What I’ve Read This Week

In a comment below, Greg reminds me that as a more experienced faculty member chatting with a relative newcomer, I once dodged a question about what I read.  I’m so sorry!  As partial amends, and for what it’s worth to anyone curious about how I spend my non-blogging time, here’s my reading list for this week.  Some of these are papers that relate to my current projects.  Some of them are things that interest me for other reasons.  Most but not all of them are papers that I noticed via SSRN email announcements or via blog announcements, or both.

It’s not representative in the sense that some weeks are heavier than this one, and some weeks are lighter.  It’s not representative in the sense that some weeks are more focused than this one on reading material that I’ve identified as bearing on a research project, or as bearing on teaching.

Papers:

• Paul Schiff Berman, Global Legal Pluralism
• Curtis Bridgeman, Why Contracts Scholars Should Read Legal Philosophy
• Rajiv Shah and Jay Kesan, Analyzing Information Technology & Societal Interactions
• Greg Lastowka, Google’s Law
• Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, The New Servitudes
• Lior Strahilevitz, Reputation Nation

I’ve also read a couple of pre-SSRN manuscripts that colleagues sent to me to solicit comments.  And the week is not done; I may pick up additional papers via SSRN before Friday.

Books:

I am going through Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, again.  I have a pre-publication book manuscript from a colleague.  I recently finished two books by John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers (a collection of recent essays), and The Curve of Binding Energy (first published in 1973).  McPhee is my favorite writer, and over the last 15 years, I have been slowly working my way through everything that he has written.  I’m almost there.  I also recently finished The Measure of All Things, by Ken Alder.  And I started Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.