I’m considering submitting two new course proposals to our curriculum committee at our law school here in DC. I’d be grateful for your pedagogical advice.
One would be a reading-research seminar in law and economics on the current state of debate over the Efficient Market Hypothesis. I imagine we would read some standard economics articles and material running back over the last few decades, including classics like A Random Walk Down Wall Street, but also a couple of recent books on the debate, including Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market, and perhaps Dick Posner’s book, among other things. One specifically law school connection would be to help students understand how the theory underpins much regulation, how courts view cases, many parts of the law itself.
The second class would be on financial derivatives, considered as contracts. We already have a class on derivative regulation at my school – this would be a class specifically on the contracts themselves, and the economic context in which the derivatives are used.
Would those seem like useful seminar courses for business law students in their third year of law school? Or yet another example of professor doing what interests him without much attention as to pedagogical utility? We are a solid mid tier school, in DC; many, many of our students go into government regulatory agencies dealing with the economy.