In a couple of earlier posts, I have discussed the intersection of law and accounting as professions, professional standards, and particularly the role of accounting background as part of legal education. Leaving aside the question of public international law, my answer to Eric's question of what should law students take is not, as Eric suggests, statistics but - accounting! My earlier posts raised a lively discussion about the importance of lawyers understanding at least the basics of financial statements, discounted cash flow analysis, and many related issues.

Professor Robert Bloomfield, professor of accounting and management at Cornell, got in touch with me at that point to raise a specific question about how financial accounting should treat litigation contingencies. Professor Bloomfield, in addition to his academic appointment, is also director of the Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative (FASRI), an organization funded by the accounting standards board FASB. I have invited Professor Bloomfield to draft up a guest post, which I will put up separately, inviting comment on the question of when firms should recognize, for accounting purposes, a liability due to possible litigation.

I will put up Professor Bloomfield's discussion below, but I wanted to preface it here by thanking Professor Bloomfield for setting out this question and framing it in a way to invite discussion among the Volokh Conspiracy readership. I myself would like to see much more interaction and discussion, among academics as well as practitioners, among regulators and those setting regulatory and professional standards, between law and accounting. I don't pretend to be an expert - indeed, it is the fact of having learned what limited amounts I know of accounting over the years in practice, through bar courses, online courses, home study books, etc. - that makes me wish there were more attention to it at the front end in legal education. I am not opening this post up for comments, but welcome comments and responses to Professor Bloomfield's question in the following post. If we are able to get a useful discussion going, I will perhaps put up an intermittently series of accounting-law posts over the next while. But I want to warmly thank Professor Bloomfield for bringing this issue to the Volokh community.