Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Marshmallow Farming in Delaware

Posted on September 22, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

From time to time I plan to post mini-reviews of blogs I like. I like a number of the ones you see linked to all over the place, but there are also some less well-known, quirky and human ones that appeal to me. One of these, although far from obscure, is called Sneaking Suspicions. I like it for several reasons. The author is a practicing administrative lawyer who lives in a small town, Rehoboth Delaware. I teach federal administrative law, and it's fun to see someone talking in a level-headed way about applying the stuff I teach to practical contexts. That he does state admin law makes little difference to the fundamental principles. Plus, Rehoboth was where we went to the beach when I was a kid. I didn't (and don't) particularly love going to the beach—in some ways Miami is wasted on me—but I it's fun to have a tie to the place being talked about. Perhaps what I like best, though, is the reasonableness of it all; Fritz Schranck, the author, reads the advance sheets (recent court decisions), and makes wry and sensible comments on the foibles of the often somewhat unreasonable litigants.

And then, there's the occasional off-the-wall item. As Washingtonians, our taste of Delaware was limited to the coast. Who knew what delights were hidden inland? For example, my kids were very impressed when I showed them the picture of the Marshmallow Farm. [Update: Link via Wayback Machine.]

Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on Marshmallow Farming in Delaware

I Thought the Military Was Supposed to Deceive the Enemy

Posted on September 22, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I thought for sure the blogosphere would jump all over this, but if so I missed it. The other day the New York Times ran an article about General Wesley Clark by Katharine Q. Seelye entitled Weighing his Run, General Was Encouraged and Praised by Clintons. Now, I'll be the first to admit that the source here is not the most reliable one. This is after all the same Katharine Seelye who so memorably and unprofessionally slanted her coverage of the last Presidential election. (Want examples to substantiate this serious charge? OK. Look here, here, and here.) Nevertheless, this was an eyebrow-raiser:

To Clark's humiliation, Clinton's Pentagon relieved him of his command. And Clinton had signed off on the plan, according to several published accounts, apparently unaware that he was being deceived by Clark's detractors.
…
The end came unceremoniously. It was July 1999, shortly after Clark had led the successful air war against Serbia. Clark was forced to retire early by top people at the Pentagon who, according to several accounts, tricked Clinton.

This is pretty amazing stuff: top military or civilian officials deceiving or tricking the President. Is this common knowledge? Substantiated? Did heads roll? If not, why not?

Of course, it makes a major difference if it was the civilians or the military.

Continue reading →

Posted in Politics: US | 3 Comments

Rose Burawoy, Political Scientist

Posted on September 22, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Lately, I have been thinking a great deal about something grandmother once said.

Rose Burawoy was born in Bialystock, then a thriving metropolis with a substantial Jewish population. She told me once — exactly once, as she never mentioned it again — that she remembered ‘the Cossacks’ running through and killing people in a pogrom when she was a child. She described it as something that had happened to other people, perhaps not far away, not as an eyewitness. (And, indeed, there was a pogrom in Bialystock in 1903, more killings in the area in 1920, and a pattern of killings and other anti-Semitic incidents in the 1930s ). In the retelling at least, my grandmother seems to have been as bothered by what she saw as provincialism, and was happy to escape to the bright lights of Berlin. Her life, and marriages, would later take her to Paris, and London, where she lived when World War II began, and finally to New York, where I think she was happy to be.

This geography explains something my grandmother once said that I find myself thinking of fairly often these days. I vividly recall my grandmother — alone in the family — objecting when I first said I wanted to become a lawyer. Don’t do that, she said. Why not be a doctor? Or a businessman, or anything else that involves a portable skill. A lawyer can only work in one country, and you can’t take your skill with you if you have to leave. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I asked, ‘I like it here.’ And my grandmother, who usually treated me like a child, and who rarely said anything terribly grave about anything, much less the war — tending to limit her political commentary to how bad it was that old people had to worry about being mugged by the hooligans on the Manhattan streets, and how /insert-conservative-politician/ was good for the Jews because he was strong on defense — gave me a knowing, wise, slightly sad, very grownup look, that said she knew I, the American grandson, was not going to understand, and said, ‘When the Nazis come to America, what will you do then?’.

I laughed, of course. The Nazis were not going to take over America. And she said, quite seriously, ‘That’s what we said in Germany. Germany was the freest most democratic country in the world before Hitler. You’ll see.’

I still don’t think the Nazis are coming. But my grandmother’s question is a galling reminder that in politics, like in the securities markets, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Continue reading →

Posted in Personal, Politics: US | 9 Comments

Hedging the Dollar

Posted on September 19, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Brad DeLong, who I’ve known since grade school and who writes a wonderful semi-daily journal, does not hedge as he puts into words something I’ve been wondering about for a couple of weeks: “why foreign exchange traders, gibbering in terror as they look at the U.S. trade deficit, haven’t dumped the dollar, pushing it down in value”. My answer to that question might lean a bit more on the traders’ belief that the Euro isn’t yet a reliable reserve currency — maybe there’s a shortage of perfect substitutes for the dollar. But if that’s right, it also follows that it should be a major objective of US fiscal policy to ensure that the dollar remains more attractive than the Euro. Even a partial switch to the Euro would be a catastrophic event (in both senses of the word). The Bush administration’s complacency on this issue appears to have one or more of these three causes: lack of imagination, lack of intelligence (that seems to be Brad’s guess), or the completely mendacious short-termism more commonly associated with barbarians looting the city.

But enough theory. Suppose I believe that the dollar is over (or under) valued. Short of buying foreign currency at ruinous bank rates, which then would require an account to hold them, or buying short term currency futures which expire too fast, what sort of foreign-currency-denominated asset is there that I can acquire on reasonable terms (small lots, low transactions costs)? Who markets currency hedges to households? Any single foreign stock or bond is too risky, if only because I am too ignorant to pick one. And the so-called foreign-currency bond funds on offer that invest in the major stable currencies (as opposed to emerging market funds) seem, when you look at them carefully, to hold amazing amounts of US government bonds. Many of them are also set up in ways that appear designed to allow speculation on medium- to long-term interest rate differentials rather than currency rates — you buy a dollar’s worth of the fund, and the price stays fixed, with returns fluctuating over time primarily as a result of changes in interest rates. Is there a market opportunty here, or is it already filled?

Posted in Econ & Money | 4 Comments

Virtual Worlds, Real Rules

Posted on September 19, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I am off to Washington, DC to attend the 31st Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy known to all as TPRC, for Telecommunications Policy Research Council. Here’s the abstract of Virtual Worlds, Real Rules (.pdf), the paper I’ll be co-presenting with Caroline Bradley — who is more than just a co-author:

In Virtual Worlds such as Ultima Online and Everquest, the Internet may accidentally provide an environment that lends itself well to the testing of legal rules.

A growing literature suggests that there is a relationship between certain legal rules and economic well-being. Data about the economic consequences of rules would enormously enrich debates over economic regulation. Unfortunately, in the real world experimenting with legal rules can be costly and risky. Some scholars of comparative law attempt to draw lessons by comparing the diverse experiences of different countries, but these efforts too often fall prey to errors of cultural, not to mention legal, translation.

Virtual worlds could permit experiments without the real-world costs of bad rules or regulatory competition. Existing role playing games tend to include internal market regulations that resemble those seen in Western capitalist economies. These rules could be changed, or different versions of the game might use different variants. Online role playing games would provide better data than economic models because it should be possible to design the games to reduce the number of assumptions involved. Moreover, game participants are likely to care about outcomes more than participants in laboratory-based experiments, if only because resource constraints force these to be conducted for low stakes.

Despite the name, and the historic focus on straight telecoms, in the past four or five years TPRC emerged as the place to go for interesting work on Internet and e-commerce. Uniquely among the conferences I attend, the organizers were not only interdisciplinary, but managed a good mix of business school and law school types. Even more unusual was the positively military insistence that papers be in on time, well before the conference, or you lost your free admission. In my experience TPRC draws very good papers from very good people. In its former venue TPRC had great soft chairs in the common area, where you could sit for hours talking to colleagues while missing out on sitting on the hard chairs in the lecture rooms.

Continue reading →

Posted in Law: Internet Law, Writings | 5 Comments

A New Blog

Posted on September 15, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

The world needs another weblog like a hole in the head. It seemed to me, though, that I had a few things to say. And although I’ve been running a weblog called ICANNWatch for years, it’s very specialized, and unsuited for more personal musings. So here it is.

In future posts I’ll try to say a little more about who I am and what my interests are. My main goal right now is getting the site running and redoing the templates. If you stumble on this now, before the official roll-out, I suppose I ought to point out that I also have an official (boring) homepage, and a somewhat more interesting personal homepage at law.tm–although it’s a little disorganized.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on A New Blog