Maybe the outpouring of affection for AIM is a way of remembering a more innocent era online, when the Internet seemed freer, weirder, less corporate and hostile.
Private equity in the 1980s was a controversial topic, commonly associated with corporate raids, hostile takeovers, asset stripping, layoffs, plant closings and outsized profits to investors.
The picks aren't likely to vary one bit from the template of judges that he deems his ideal; judges that are conservative, pro-corporate, and hostile to labor and civil rights.
Suddenly, popular representations of yuppies painted them as money-mad locusts sweeping through corporate America, performing hostile takeovers, dismembering corporations and destroying jobs.
Mr. Flom's rejection by establishment law firms forced him into new areas, like work on lucrative hostile corporate takeovers.
Even in gentlemanly corporate Japan, where hostile bids are a rarity, at least two big companies are fighting off the unwanted attentions of outsiders.
The medicine they seek is the "poison pill": a takeover defence developed in America in the 1980s, after hostile corporate acquisitions took off there.
In 1987, Mr. Redstone took control of Viacom through National Amusements in a hostile corporate takeover, then went on to acquire CBS in 2000 in a nearly $40 billion deal.
In South Korea, which has never had a hostile corporate takeover, a foreign buyer making a run at any big company would set off alarms.
Such hostile corporate practices had long been seen as Anglo-Saxon or American aberrations, unacceptable in the traditionally more closed and clubby world of German industry.
