The Faculty Lounge

Taboo Trades Podcast: Specific Performance, Twitter, and Elon Musk with Nate Oman

In this episode, UVA Law 3Ls Bridget Boyd and Jenn Scoler join me to interview Nathan B. Oman, the W. Taylor Reveley III Research Professor and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Markets at William & Mary School of Law. Nate specializes in Contract Law, the Economic Analysis of Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Religion, and Legal History. Today, we’re discussing his 2009 article, Specific Performance and the Thirteenth Amendment, published in the Minnesota Law Review.

The article first came to my attention this summer, when the internet erupted with suggestions that the specific performance clause in the Elon Musk (more precisely, X Holdings) merger agreement with Twitter wasn’t enforceable because of the 13^thAmendment. As you’ll hear in this episode, Nate is having none of that.

I’ve split my discussion with Nate into two parts. In this Part, largely driven by questions from Bridget and Jenn, we discuss the Musk-Twitter litigation and the various provisions of the merger agreement, including the specific performance provision and the termination fee. If you’re covering that litigation in class this year, in my completely and wholly unbiased view :-), the episode makes a really nice introduction for students to some of the issues.

 

 

Links:

Nathan B. Oman faculty bio https://law2.wm.edu/faculty/bios/fulltime/nboman.php

 

Nathan B. Oman, Specific Performance and the Thirteenth Amendment, 93 MINN. L. REV. 2020 (2009). https://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Oman_MLR.pdf

 

Amendment and Plan of Merger by and among X Holdings I, Inc., X Holdings II, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. dated as of April 25, 2022 https://kimberlydkrawiec.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Musk-Twitter-Agreement.pdf

Taboo Trades Returns for Season 3

Welcome to Season 3 of the Taboo Trades podcast! Hear more about this year's topics and guests and listen to UVA Law students introduce themselves and talk about why they're taking time out of their busy law school schedules to produce this podcast with me.

This year's co-hosts are: Bryan Blaylock, Bridget Boyd, Makenna Cherry, Reider Compasano, Ryan Fitzgerald, Rahima Ghafoori, Caroline Gozigian, Marley Peters, Meghana Puchalapalli, Jennifer Scoler, and Mary Talkington

 

 

 

Taboo Trades Bonus Episode: Ending the Kidney Shortage with Frank McCormick

Frank McCormick is an economist and the author of numerous articles focused on the shortage of kidneys for transplantation. He is retired from the Bank of America where he was Vice-president and Director of U.S. Economic and Financial Research. Today, we’re discussing his recent article, Projecting the Economic Impact of Compensating Living Kidney Donors in the United States: Cost-Benefit Analysis Demonstrates Substantial Patient and Societal Gains, co-authored with Philip J. Held, Glenn Chertow, Thomas G. Peters, and John P. Roberts. It is published in the journal, Value in Health and is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109830152201957X/

The Plagiarism Taboo with Brian Frye

A new bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast is up and it is a lot of fun.

My guest is one of the most unusual and creative voices in the legal academy, Brian Frye, the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky. He teaches classes in civil procedure, intellectual property, copyright, and nonprofit organizations, as well as a seminar on law and popular culture. Today we’re engaging in academic navel gazing and opining on plagiarism, law review publishing, and scholarly shit posting.

Brian is also a filmmaker. He produced the documentary Our Nixon (2013), which was broadcast by CNN and opened theatrically nationwide. His short films and videos have shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among other venues, and are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His critical writing on film and art has appeared in October, The New Republic, Film Comment, Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, and Incite! among other journals.

Professor Frye also produces a podcast that I highly recommend, Ipse Dixit https://shows.pippa.io/ipse-dixit

 

 

Taboo Trades Podcast Bonus Episode: Taboo Children with Sean Williams

Hello everyone and welcome to the first bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast!

As regular listeners know, I’ve sadly had to say goodbye to the amazing group of students who were my co-hosts for Season 2. But I decided to do a couple of bonus episodes this summer, and this is the first, featuring Sean Williams of the University of Texas School of Law. I also have a very special co-host, one of my favorite colleagues at UVA Law, Gregg Strauss.

Sean Williams studies decision making dynamics in a wide variety of areas including marriage markets, parental investments in child safety, jury damage awards, and consumer contracts. He writes widely on Family Law, Tort Theory, and Behavioral Law and Economics. Today we’re discussing his new working paper, “Sacred Children and Taboo Tradeoffs,” which is downloadable from SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4163131

Gregg Strauss is with me at the University of Virginia school of law. He is both a lawyer and a philosopher, and studies the limits of legitimate law in situations of fundamental disagreement, with an emphasis on familial relationships.

 

Kidneys For Sale in Iran: Market Design Blog

Via Al Roth's Market Design Blog:

Just published in Transplant International (which is the journal of the European Society for Organ Transplantation), is a paper describing the Iranian market for kidneys in the city of Mashad, and three commentaries on it.  

 Here's the original paper:

Kidneys for Sale: Empirical Evidence From Iran  by Tannaz Moeindarbari and Mehdi Feizi

And here are three short commentaries.

Kidneys for Sale? A Commentary on Moeindarbari’s and Feizi’s Study on the Iranian Model  by Frederike Ambagtsheer1, Sean Columb, Meteb M. AlBugami, and Ninoslav Ivanovski

Kidneys for Sale: Are We There Yet? (Commentary on Kidneys for Sale: Empirical Evidence From Iran) by Kyle R. Jackson, Christine E. Haugen, and Dorry L. Segev

Criminal, Legal, and Ethical Kidney Donation and Transplantation: A Conceptual Framework to Enable Innovation  by Alvin E. Roth, Ignazio R. Marino, Kimberly D. Krawiec and Michael A. Rees

***********

The commentary by Roth, Marino, Krawiec and Rees contrasts the legal Iranian market with the dangerous black markets that operate elsewhere, outside of regular medical institutions.

Here's a recent long article that pulls together much of the discussion on compensation for donors and on sale of kidneys and transplant black markets:

Organ Trafficking, Can the illicit trade be stopped? By Sarah Glazer,  CQ Researcher, June 24, 2022 – Volume 32, Issue 22

HT: Frank McCormick

 

Getting Away with Taboo Trades with Gabriel Rossman, Pt. 2

Welcome to part 2 of my interview with Gabriel Rossman, Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack.  We continue our discussion of sex, drugs, and Islamic finance, among other taboo trades. 

It’s also our final episode of season 2. Please listen to the end of the episode for a special goodbye from America’s favorite law students. Thank you to Gabriel for helping us wrap up this season with a great episode. And thanks to all of you for listening. 

 

Getting Away With Taboo Trades With Gabriel Rossman, Pt. 1

Want to buy sex, bribe a politician, or get your dumb kid into an Ivy League school? I discuss how to get away with taboo trades with Gabriel Rossman, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and my co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack.

Rossman studies cultural industries (such as radio and film) and economic sociology (including diffusion and disreputable exchange). He is interested in how people structure immoral exchanges like bribery to make them more subtle and therefore less obviously immoral.

I’ve been an admirer of Rossman’s work for a number of years and was so happy to have this opportunity to talk to him about his research that I kept him longer than normal and have divided his podcast into two parts. In this part, we talk about sugar babies, college admissions, Bill Cosby, and Islamic finance. We also discuss a forthcoming book manuscript on the obfuscation of disreputable exchange that Gabriel generously shared, currently titled “How to Get Away With Paying Bribes, Buying Sex, and Selling Corpses.

 

 

Suggested Readings

· “It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional.” 2018. (with Oliver Schilke) American Sociological Review.

· “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange.” 2014. Sociological Theory.

· “The Diffusion of the Legitimate and the Diffusion of Legitimacy.” 2014. Sociological Science.

· Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton University Press. 2012.

Kidneys with Sally Satel

I discuss what it's like to need (and receive) a life-saving kidney transplant with AEI's Sally Satel (a two-time kidney transplant patient) and UVA 3L, Caitlyn Stollings, who co-hosts this episode.

Dr. Satel is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the staff psychiatrist at a local methadone clinic in Washington D.C. She was also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993 and remains a lecturer at Yale.

Importantly for our purposes, she is a two-time kidney transplant patient and has written widely about that experience. Dr. Satel is also the editor of When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors

 

 

This episode features a kidney recipient, but we've also done two episodes featuring Good Samaritan donors, here:

and here:

Taboo Trades Podcast: Marijuana Legalization with Douglas Berman

 

 

I discuss marijuana legalization and why Congress is so incompetent, with Ohio State's Douglas Berman and UVA Law 3L, Cortney Inman, my co-host for this episode.

Douglas Berman is the Newton D. Baker-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law, and the Executive Director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. His principal teaching and research focus is criminal law and sentencing, and marijuana law and policy.

Professor Berman is the co-author of two casebooks. Sentencing Law and Policy and Marijuana Law and Policy. He has served as an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter for more than a decade and is the sole creator and author of the widely-read and widely-cited blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, which now receives nearly 100,000 page views per month and was the first blog ever cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Recommended Reading:

Drug Enforcement and Policy Center: Marijuana Reform Focus Area
https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/faculty-and-research/drug-enforcement-and-policy-center/marijuana-reform

Joanna Lampe, Congressional Research Service, Does the President Have the Power to Legalize Marijuana? (Nov. 4, 2021), at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10655

Jennifer Le, Federal Cannabis Reform – Is 2022 the Year?, National Law Review (Feb 11, 2022), at
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/federal-cannabis-reform-2022-year

Hailey Fuchs & Natalie Fertig, Big Weed is on the brink of scoring big political wins. So where are they?. Politico, Jan. 22, 2022, at https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/22/big-weed-brink-scoring-political-wins-527604

Douglas Berman & Alex Kreit, Marijuana Law & Policy Casebook https://www.amazon.com/Marijuana-Law-Policy-Douglas-Berman/dp/1531010377

This is actually our second episode on marijuana legalization, so if you like this episode you should listen to this one from last season with Pat Oglesby

 

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: College Sports with Paul Haagen

With the Final Four nearly upon us, I discuss the future of college sports with Paul Haagen of Duke University and UVA Law 3L, Jackson Bailey.

Paul is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy at Duke University. His principal academic interests are contracts, the social history of law, and law and sports.

Recommended Reading:

Sports in the Courts: The NCAA and the Future of Intercollegiate Revenue Sports, 103 Judicature 54-61 (2019)

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: Decommodification As Exploitation with Vida Panitch

Vida Panitch and I discuss Decommodification As Exploitation with my co-host, UVA Law 3L Nevah Jones. Vida Panitch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Ethics and Public Affairs at Carleton University. Her primary research project addresses the moral boundaries of markets – specifically markets in public goods, including health care and education, and physical goods, including body parts and intimate services – and the extent to which theories of exploitation, commodification, and inequality can help us determine their permissible regulation. 

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: Pandemics with Govind Persad

Co-hosts Samantha Spindler (UVA Law 2L), Madison White (UVA Law 3L), and I discuss pandemic responses with Govind Persad. Our focus is how to preserve personal choice in crisis response. 

Persad is an Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm college of law. Persad’s research interests center on the legal and ethical dimensions of health insurance, health care financing, and markets in health care services, as well as professional ethics and the regulation of medical research.

 

The Bodies of Former Slaves With Fred Smith

Fred and I discuss what society owes to the bodies and memories of former slaves with our co-host, UVA Law 3L Tom DelRegno

Fred Smith Jr. is a Professor of Law at Emory University. He is a scholar of the federal judiciary, constitutional law, and local government. In 2019, he was named the law school’s Outstanding Professor of the Year.

New Taboo Trades Podcast Episode: Reproductive Markets with Kim Mutcherson

There’s a new episode of the Taboo Trades podcast, featuring Kim Mutcherson, the Co-Dean and a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School in Camden. Kim and I, together with Thalia Stanberry (UVA Law 3L) discuss commercial surrogacy, reproductive technology, sex work, and CRISPR

 

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: Kidney To Share

Listen to a new episode of the Taboo Trades podcast: Kidney to Share with Martha Gershun and John Lantos, co-hosted by UVA Law 3Ls Kaitlyn O’Malley and Caitlyn Stollings. It’s an especially good episode. Appearances also from UVA Law students Nevah Jones, Alex Leseney, Thalia Stanberry, Samantha Spindler, and Tom DelRegno.

 

Repugnance with Al Roth

On the latest episode of The Taboo Trades podcast, Al Roth and I discuss hitmen, drugs, kidneys, paid sex, and other repugnances. We’re joined by co-hosts Madison White and Alex Leseney (both UVA 3Ls), with appearances from UVA 3Ls Thalia Stanberry, Caitlyn Stollings, Jackson Bailey, and Autumn Adams-jack. A good time was had by all!

The Taboo Trades Podcast is Back!

I'm so happy that the Taboo Trades podcast is back, after a hiatus

 

 

Book Recommendation: Kidney To Share by Martha Gershun And John D. Lantos

Over the holidays, I finished Kidney To Share, a new book by Martha Gershun And John D. Lantos published by Cornell University Press and highly recommend it! It’s extremely well-done—informative, funny, thought-provoking.

The book alternates between chapters from Martha and John, with Martha taking readers through a personal account of her non-directed kidney donation to a woman she had never met but shared a number of social connections with and whose story she came across in a local media story. John’s chapters place Martha’s personal experience within the larger context of the history and ethics of living kidney donation.

It is a fascinating account. You will read this and marvel at the fact that anyone would complete the expensive, time-consuming, and opaque process to become a living donor for a complete stranger. This is a terrible state of affairs, and not only because the transplant waitlist currently stands at over 100,000 people (the vast majority of them waiting for a kidney) and we need more living donors to address the shortage. But also because, as I was reminded during the ugly “Bad Art Friend” affair, living donors deserve better treatment.

Much of the work on the kidney shortage focuses on risks to donors and (as the book notes) debates over whether financial incentives can safely increase the number of donors. But Martha and John highlight the numerous other hurdles faced by would-be donors, that are almost never discussed. As Martha details in the book, at the time of her decision, she was a recently-retired business executive with a spouse still working. Time and time again problems that should have been solved by Mayo were left to her creativity and research skills to solve, expenses that should have been covered by insurance were personally paid by her or her recipient, and she had to advocate for herself and her donation in ways that no donor should have to. Most would-be donors do not have the time, money, dedication, confidence, and advocacy skills to take on this task. And Martha tells these stories with grace and humor – from a dry ice snafu to the problems caused by a (legal) marijuana encounter, the book’s ultimately happy ending is a long time coming and not at all a guaranteed result.

I highly recommend Kidney to Share. There’s even a (very well read) audible version for folks like me who prefer to multitask.

Taboo Trades on the Private Law Podcast

On the latest episode of The Private Law Podcast I discuss Taboo Markets and Trades with Felipe Jimenez. It was a wonderfully engaging conversation, due to Felipe’s thoughtfulness and knowledge. The topics ranged from sex work and egg and sperm markets to kidney donation and the Bad Art Friend.

You can listen here

or here

 

 

It’s also on Apple, Spotify, and other services.