This is technology, law, and society only in the most indirect way, but I can’t resist acknowledging the most recent symposium produced by the Yale Law Journal’s Pocket Part, on Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). We will all be hearing a lot more about SWFs and their US-based regulatory correspondent, CFIUS (the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States), in the coming months and years. Some view SWFs as economic imperialists, but as Mihir Desai and Dhammika Dharmapala argue, that reverses the order of things. We have met Willie Sutton, and he is us. To coin a phrase, SWFs are where the money is.
The Symposium shows off online law journal publishing at its best: It is a timely examination of a topic that is of real and substantial interest to lawyers and policymakers alike, with contributions from notable legal scholars (Fleischer, for example) and practitioners (Plotkin; full disclosure: he is a close friend of mine).
As the latter notes, they don’t teach you this stuff in law school.