University of Illinois College of Law Professor Larry Ribstein passed away at the age of 65 on December 24. Larry personified the term “prolific writer.” Washington Legal Foundation is honored to have published seven papers written by Larry over a 12-year span, which can all be accessed here. Our favorites were two papers questioning the constitutionality of paternalistic speech-related securities laws which protected investors from themselves, and a Legal Backgrounder co-authored with Professor Henry Butler advancing the notion that shareholders should be allowed to vote on whether the provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley should apply to their smaller companies.
When authoring article after article for law reviews, book chapters, and entire books failed to completely satisfy his endless intellectual curiosity, he started up one of the first widely read legal blogs on the Internet, Ideoblog. After years of penning almost daily posts on a wide variety of legal, policy, and cultural subjects, Larry joined a number of other like-minded professors as a primary contributor to Truth on the Market, a site we frequently reference in our Friday “Finger on the Pulse” blog post summaries. Truth on the Market has been offering testimonials from Larry’s peers and others all this week at the site.
Larry’s work, educational innovations, and always original scholarship were an inspiration to us at WLF, and we will miss him.