Law Commons^™

Keynote Address: The Role Of Lawyers In The Global Financial Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

In recent articles, the author has argued that the global financial crisis can be attributed in large part to three causes — conflicts, complacency and complexity — as well as to a type of tragedy of the commons. This article, which comprised the keynote address for the 2010 Corporate Law Teachers Association Conference, will focus on the failure of market observers, including corporate lawyers, to foresee or act on critical correlations that might have prevented, or at least mitigated, the crisis. Although conflicts, complacency, complexity and the tragedy of the commons can help to explain this failure, the goal will …