Around the Blogosphere

It seems everyone is talking about Michael Lewis’s new Vanity
Fair article, The Man Who Crashed the
World.  From the lead-in:

Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse,
despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of
what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people
involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products
unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over
400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial
system to their knees.

Larry Ribstein has a nice discussion of the piece here.

Jennifer Collins, Ethan Leib, and Dan Markel are guest
blogging at Freakonomics,
discussing their new book, Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and
the Challenge of Family Ties. 
Some of the comments they’ve gotten so far are . . . well,
interesting. 

Ann
Bartow discusses the failed attempt to include women’s ski jumping in next
year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver (do watch the video).  I couldn’t find a copy of the opinion but,
according to Reuters,
British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon ruled that, "There
will be little solace to the plaintiffs in my finding that they have been
discriminated against; there is no remedy available to them in this court."
 Fenlon held that only the IOC,
which is not directly bound by Canadian civil rights laws, and not the
Vancouver Organizing Committee, has the authority to decide which sports are included
in Olympic competitions.

And Steve
Bainbridge and Paul
Caron, prompted by Katherine Mangan’s Chronicle of Higher
Education article, Law Schools Mull
Whether They Are Churning Out Too Many Lawyers, (subscription or web pass
required for access) discuss whether law is a “mature industry” that is
producing too many lawyers for the market to absorb.