First Annual Columbia Business Law Review Banquet Considers the Next Financial Crisis

New York, May 28, 2015—Members of the Columbia Business Law Review (CBLR) gathered alongside leading practitioners and academics at the Columbia Club of New York April 22 to celebrate the Review’s growing legacy and to look ahead to challenges on the horizon. Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey N. Gordon, who published his most recent article—Money Market Funds Run Risk: Will Floating Net Asset Value Fix the Problem?—in the Review, delivered the banquet’s keynote address.
 

The evening kicked off with reflections from Editor-in-Chief Elaine Liu ’15 on another successful year, with updates on CBLR’s submissions and production process, alumni outreach program, marketing initiative, redesigned website, and the newly established annual banquet and fundraising campaigns.

 

“It has been an incredible honor to have the opportunity to lead so distinguished a journal as the Columbia Business Law Review,” Liu said. “The many achievements of this past year would not have been possible without the hard work of our current editorial board and staff, and the 28 years of history that came before us.”

 

Liu introduced Professor Robert J. Jackson Jr., an active member of the CBLR Board of Directors and a favorite Note advisor among the Review’s staff.

 

“You are part of the great Columbia tradition of understanding why business law is important and in every respect worth writing about, and CBLRunderstood it a generation ago, before anyone else,” said Jackson, who along with Gordon co-directs the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School. “You have had this legacy entrusted to you—thank you for holding it so dear.”

 

 

Jackson also spoke of the recent passing of two members of the CBLR Board of Advisors, Professors Harvey J. Goldschmid and Marvin A. Chirelstein, who played important roles shaping the Review for more than two decades.

 

“There is a long legacy of an especially close relationship between the faculty and CBLR, and Harvey Goldschmid and Marvin Chirelstein were giants in the law,” Jackson said.

 

In his keynote address, Gordon discussed a topic important to all those entering the legal market and the broader business world: the roots of the next great financial crisis. He outlined two key contributing factors: the expense of credit within the official banking system, and political risks, such as the ability of major financial institutions to shape and distort regulations.

 

“The next financial crisis will come from the unofficial, or ‘shadow,’ banking system and from some sort of financial innovation that appears to be a great success, but we will come to find out that it still has systemic land mines as money market funds did and as subprime mortgages did,” said Gordon, the Richard Paul Richman Professor of Law and co-director of the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy.

 

The evening concluded with a presentation of staffer awards to 2Ls and light-hearted superlative titles for graduating 3Ls.

The Review was the first business law journal established at an Ivy League school, and has published leading scholarship on the intersection between business and law for nearly three decades. CBLR consistently ranks among the most influential journals of business law, with recent citations in The Economist and The Washington Post, among others, as well as by the U.S. Supreme Court and nearly every federal circuit court of appeals. Published three times a year, CBLR has recently published work from contributors including European antitrust practitioner Jean-François Bellis; Delaware Chancellor William B. Chandler III; and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz partner William Savitt ’97, a member of the Law School’s adjunct faculty.