Tomorrow: MLEA highlights

Tomorrow I am off to Washington University in St. Louis for the Law and Economics Conference. Thankful to guest speakers -- I have a terrific speaker driving down from Los Angeles to teach the sex harassment section of my employment class, with war stories on how he singlehandedly defended NBC studios in the lawsuit brought by a writer on the Friends sitcom, claiming the jokes in the writers' room, during the brainstorming sessions for each episode, created a hostile work environment.

At Wash U, I will be presenting two behavioral law and econ articles: one on my experimental work of the effects of non-competes on motivation and performance, here; the other on the effects of decision-making environments and age on risk in the context of pensions and financial planning, here. As I glance at the MLEA program, it strikes me how much our ideas of what law and econ scholarship can look like have expanded dramatically compared to a decade ago. Interestingly, many papers this year about legal education itself. The first talk of the first day is by Peter Huang, presenting his memoir as an ex-child prodigy. It sounds fascinating; I have always like Peter's work on positive psychology, wellbeing and the law, and now he brings to us his personal story. here is a taste:

I am a Chinese American who at 14 enrolled at Princeton and at 17 began my applied mathematics Ph.D. at Harvard. I was a first-year law student at the University of Chicago  before transferring to Stanford, preferring the latter’s pedagogical culture. This Article offers a complementary account to Amy Chua’s parenting memoir. The Article discusses how mainstream legal education and tiger parenting are similar and how they can be improved by fostering life-long learning about character strengths, emotions, and ethics.