I loved the first season of HBO’s Succession. Superb acting, great sets, and a story about a totally dysfunctional family (that makes me think that my own dysfunctional one is relatively functional). Plus, the really really rich and despicable people in the show (modeled on actual really really rich people – see here) are miserable – and I can’t help but be entertained by that. All of that said, I did not realize, until I heard the wonderful and brilliant combination of Felix Salmon, Emily Peck and Anna Szymanski discuss the show on their Slate Money podcast a few weeks ago, how much of the show connected to interesting corporate law questions. Long story short, for those of you who love Succession and teach business law stuff, I think you will enjoy the combination of watching the show and listening to the special Slate Money podcasts about the show (this is just a season 2 thing). Actually, you don’t need to give a rat’s ass about corporate law to enjoy the combination of watching Succession in the late evening and listening to Slate Money the next morning. In fact, there have been occasions where I’ve enjoyed the podcast more than the particular episode of Succession.

And, while on the subject of podcasts, I recently came across an excellent podcast that discusses new financial law papers. It is run by Andrew Jennings at Stanford Law (here). Andrew is unfailingly polite, but he clearly has thought about the papers in question and asks tough questions. I’ve only listened to a couple of episodes so far, but I plan to try and listen to them all. I especially liked the podcast about Cathy Hwang’s 2019 paper on “Faux Contracts” and the roles that contracts can play even when there is no enforcement possibility (podcast is here; paper is here). I’m especially intrigued by Cathy’s concept of intra-deal reputation that constrains parties from acting opportunistically – something that she documents with detailed interviews. This intra-deal effect (it isn’t quite reputation; but something in the vein of reciprocal fairness) seems to operate on parties in individual deals even though the parties are not trying to preserve any sort of longer-term repeat-player reputation. Clearly a paper, I need to read.

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