For now there seems little alternative to the dollar as a financial lodestar and the main storehouse for the world's precautionary saving.

ECONOMIST: The path ahead

But many courts requre the lodestar as a cross-check to make sure the fee is commensurate with the work done on the case.

FORBES: Class-Action Firms Capitalize On Wretched Market For Law-School Grads

Plaintiff lawyers often criticize the lodestar method, saying a simple percentage fee does a better job of aligning their interests with those of the plaintiffs.

FORBES: Class-Action Firms Capitalize On Wretched Market For Law-School Grads

Deficit-reduction was the lodestar of policy in the 1980s.

ECONOMIST: Budget making

Thus, it is very rare for PSLRA attorneys to devote tens of thousands of hours to a case and be unable to settle for an amount that pays their lodestar in full.

FORBES: A Brief Explanation Of The Economics Of Securities Lawsuits

But once they survive the motion to dismiss, the odds are better than 4:1 in their favor on average, and they can load up the lodestar with as much discovery as the other side will tolerate.

FORBES: A Brief Explanation Of The Economics Of Securities Lawsuits

That was their other lodestar: their work.

NEWYORKER: Once Upon a Time

Joseph Schumpeter is our lodestar economist.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Two American girls go off to Barcelona for the summer Vicky (Rebecca Hall), who is intelligent, skeptical, cautious, and thoroughly engaged to a corporate lawyer in New York, and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), who is more adventurous than her friend but unformed and easily dissatisfied, a seeker without a lodestar.

NEWYORKER: Vicky Cristina Barcelona