Paging Professor Bainbridge

(Kenneth Anderson)

I have taken the plunge and assigned Professor Bainbridge's new self-published Amazon e-book, Directors as Auctioneers: A Concise Guide to Revlon-land, to my Business Associations class.  I've read it and it's outstanding, but I had some trepidation about assigning a mandatory e-book to a class of 70.  However, I polled the class and asked how many people had no access to make an Amazon purchase via Kindle, I-Pad, I-phone, or computer, and the answer was zero.  Everyone seemed to have an actual Amazon account, amazingly — I asked why, and they said, to buy textbooks.

I have assigned a small chunk now, early in the course, in connection with the initial discussion of agency law, and agent-principal problems.  This is the part (if you're familiar with the book) on the conflict between the agent's authority and the agent's accountability.  One reason it is a useful discussion is that it is not merely about changes of corporate control, or even about corporate governance — it is a useful description of the basic problem of agency, in a particular way, as well as about governance.

I will keep you posted on how it goes using an e-book as a required law text.  The book is awfully good; I use Allen, Kraakman, and Subramanian as my main Business Associations textbook, and I think this helps give both a fuller and alternative explanation for Revlon-land.