BiblioVault - Books about Fall

Early Modern Women on the Fall

An Anthology

Michelle M. Dowd

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012

Eat What You Kill

The Fall of a Wall Street Lawyer

Milton C. Regan, Jr.

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"A wonderful character study of someone whose cognitive dissonance ('I am brilliant, therefore I must be doing everything correctly') led directly to his downfall. Students would do well to read this book before venturing forth into a large firm, a small firm, or any pressure-cooker environment."
-Nancy Rapoport, University of Houston Law Center

"Eat What You Kill is gripping and well written. . . . It weaves in academic commentary and understanding of professional ethics issues in a way that makes it accessible to everyone."
-Frank Partnoy, University of San Diego Law School

He had it all, and then he lost it. But why did he do it, risking everything-wealth, success, livelihood, freedom, and the security of family?

Eat What You Kill is the story of John Gellene, a rising star and bankruptcy partner at one of Wall Street's most venerable law firms. But when Gellene became entangled in a web of conflicting corporate and legal interests involving one of his clients, he was eventually charged with making false statements, indicted, found guilty of a federal crime, and sentenced to prison.

Milton C. Regan Jr. uses Gellene's case to prove that such conflicting interests are now disturbingly commonplace in the world of American corporate finance. Combining a journalist's eye with sharp psychological insight, Regan spins Gellene's story into a gripping drama of fundamental tensions in modern-day corporate practice and describes in perfect miniature the inexorable confluence of the interests of American corporations and their legal counselors.

This confluence may seem natural enough, but because these law firms serve many masters-corporations, venture capitalists, shareholder groups-it has paradoxically led to deep, pervasive conflicts of interest. Eat What You Kill gives us the story of a man trapped in this labyrinth, and reveals the individual and systemic factors that contributed to Gellene's demise.

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English after the Fall

From Literature to Textuality

Robert Scholes

University of Iowa Press, 2011

Robert Scholes’s now classic Rise and Fall of English was a stinging indictment of the discipline of English literature in the United States. In English after the Fall, Scholes moves from identifying where the discipline has failed to providing concrete solutions that will help restore vitality and relevance to the discipline.

With the self-assurance of a master essayist, Scholes explores the reasons for the fallen status of English and suggests a way forward. Arguing that the fall of English as a field of study is due, at least in part, to the narrow view of “literature” that prevails in English departments, Scholes charts how the historical rise of English as a field of study during the early twentieth century led to the domination of modernist notions of verbal art, ultimately restricting English studies to a narrow cannon of approved texts.

After tracing the various meanings attached to the word “literature” since the Renaissance, Scholes argues that the concept of it that currently shapes the work of English departments excludes both powerful sacred documents (from the Declaration of Independence to the Bible) and pleasurable, profane works that involve the performance of roles like those of clown and teacher in many media (including popular musicals, opera, and film)—and that both sorts of works should be studied in English courses. English after the Fall is a bold manifesto for the replacement of literature with what Scholes calls textuality—an expansive and ecumenical notion of what we read and write—as the primary object of English instruction. This concise and persuasive work is destined to become required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the humanities.

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Entrepreneurial Litigation

Its Rise, Fall, and Future

John C. Coffee, Jr.

Harvard University Press, 2015

Uniquely in the United States, lawyers litigate large cases on behalf of many claimants who could not afford to sue individually. In these class actions, attorneys act typically as risk-taking entrepreneurs, effectively hiring the client rather than acting as the client’s agent. Lawyer-financed, lawyer-controlled, and lawyer-settled, such entrepreneurial litigation invites lawyers to sometimes act more in their own interest than in the interest of their clients. And because class litigation aggregates many claims, defendants object that its massive scale amounts to legalized extortion. Yet, without such devices as the class action and contingent fees, many meritorious claims would never be asserted.

John Coffee examines the dilemmas surrounding entrepreneurial litigation in a variety of specific contexts, including derivative actions, securities class actions, merger litigation, and mass tort litigation. His concise history traces how practices developed since the early days of the Republic, exploded at the end of the twentieth century, and then waned as Supreme Court decisions and legislation sharply curtailed the reach of entrepreneurial litigation. In an evenhanded account, Coffee assesses both the strengths and weaknesses of entrepreneurial litigation and proposes a number of reforms to achieve a fairer balance. His goal is to save the class action, not discard it, and to make private enforcement of law more democratically accountable. Taking a global perspective, he also considers the feasibility of exporting a modified form of entrepreneurial litigation to other countries that are today seeking a mechanism for aggregate representation.

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