Archive for 2007
Tex-ternalities and the China/Europe Spectrum
posted by Frank Pasquale
I’ve recently come across these three facts about Texas:
1) About 60% of US executions occur in Texas.
2) About 20% of children in Texas do not have health insurance–almost twice the national average.
3) Texas produces more greenhouse gas emissions than California and New York combined.
When I first saw these figures, I thought that Texas may be burdening the US with some “reputational externalities” abroad, manifest in books like Vernon God Little. The judges who awarded it the Booker Prize called it a “coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm but also our fascination with America.”
Some economic theories predict that these externalities will eventually be internalized. For example, there are many stories about a European condo-buying boom in New York; I haven’t seen as much on residential real estate purchases by overseas buyers in Texas. According to Anup Malani, “The value of a law [may] be judged [in part] by the extent to which it raises housing prices.” So perhaps more highly valued laws elsewhere in America will push up housing prices, comparatively enriching those property owners.
On the other hand, perhaps Texas’s policies are a bid to flatter China by imitation. Pollution in places like Shenzhen is a big problem (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). Executions are common. And China’s decisions about health care in the 1980s and 90s might warm many laissez-faire hearts: “From 1978 to 1999, the central government’s share of national health care spending fell from 32 percent to 15 percent [and] the central government drastically reduced its ability and commitment to redistribute health care resources from wealthy areas to poor areas.”
Looking at world trends, a modern-day Tocqueville might think that the US’s future lay in political development of either a Chinese or EU variety. Texas appears to be a red state in more ways than one.
December 26, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Posted in: Capital Punishment, Criminal Law, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Environmental Law, Politics
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Book Review: Lawrence Friedman’s Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets
posted by Daniel Solove
Professor Lawrence M. Friedman (Stanford Law School)
Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy
(Stanford University Press, November 2007)
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5739-3
Professor Lawrence Friedman‘s Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy is a wonderful and accessible history of the norms and law that shaped reputation over the past two centuries. Friedman’s book builds on some of his earlier work on norms and law in the Victorian era which I found immensely useful as I wrote my book, The Future of Reputation. Whereas my book mostly explores the present and future challenges to protecting reputation, Friedman’s explores the past. His book is written in a lively and engaging style, and it is fascinating.
Friedman focuses much of his book on the Victorian era of the nineteenth century. The key phenomenon in his book is what Friedman terms the “Victorian compromise.” The Victorian era is famous for its staunch moral code and sense of propriety. Throughout history, Western society has had periods of licentiousness and reticence, and the Victorian era is the symbol for being buttoned-up and prudish. In England and America, this was a period of strong laws against countless forms of disfavored sex, from adultery to sodomy. But Friedman notes that a lot of vice was, in fact, tolerated during this period. According to the Victorian compromise:
Vice at least was tolerable, although only in small amounts and only if discreet and under a good deal of control. Hence a kind of double standard evolved. A prime example was the so-called red-light zone or district. These zones flourished in city after city. Houses of prostitution, gambling dens, and all sorts of vice were rampant in these districts. The law–and the police–winked at them and accepted them as part of urban life. . . . This double standard was the essence of the Victorian compromise. It stands in sharp contrast to the attitude and behavior in (say) Puritan Massachusetts Bay, in the colonial period, with its policy of zero tolerance toward vice and illegal sex. (p. 67)
Friedman further notes that public discussion of sex during Victorian times was strictly taboo, and “[s]ex was meant for the privacy of the home.” (p. 72). There was a large double standard when it came to the sexual behavior of men and women. For women, all sex outside of marriage was adultery. “But a married man was criminally liable only if he had sex with a married woman. In other words, for a man sex with a prostitute–or a single woman–was not criminal adultery at all.” (p. 73)
In a chapter on blackmail, Friedman observes that the blackmail laws fit with the Victorian compromise — they were designed to help elites protect their public reputations, to help prevent them from being threatened and extorted by the often poorer individuals who were blackmailing them (their illicit lovers or servants). He notes that “the blackmail statutes began to appear roughly about the same time and with the same underlying ethos as the other laws that made up the Victorian compromise.” (p. 99). A similar point is made in Angus McLaren’s book-length account of blackmail, Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (2002). McLaren observes that courts would ignore the truth or falsity of the blackmailer’s accusations, which, if true, would often mean that the blackmail victim had engaged in serious criminal conduct (sodomy, for example).
Thus, the Victorian compromise operated to maintain a facade of respectability in public while sin occurred in the dark recesses of the private sphere. It’s ok to do it, the ethos of the age said, just be sure to hide it. The Victorian compromise “depended on privacy and secrecy.” (p. 215)
December 26, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)
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The Heroism of Susan Pace Hamill
posted by Frank Pasquale
It is now sadly all too common to see public intellectuals pointedly ignoring–or even cheering on–growing inequality. Bloodless statistical accounts tend to miss the consequences that flow for poor families when taxes on the wealthiest are cut and social programs are gutted accordingly.
Professor Susan Pace Hamill has done an extraordinary job in turning public attention to this problem. According to the NYT’s David Cay Johnston, “her latest effort is a book, As Certain as Death (Carolina Academic Press, 2007), that seeks to document how the 50 states, in contravention of her view of biblical injunctions, do more to burden the poor and relieve the rich than vice versa.” Some statistics are really striking:
The poorest fifth of Alabama families, with incomes under $13,000, pay state and local taxes that take almost 11 cents out of each dollar. The richest 1 percent, who make $229,000 or more, pay less than 4 cents out of each dollar they earn, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group whose numbers are generally considered trustworthy even by many of its opponents.
As a cursory Google search shows, Professor Pace Hamill has honed her message with extraordinary clarity and skill in a variety of forums–law review articles, books, interviews, and even sermons. Prof. Pace Hamill’s engaged scholarship and contributions as a public intellectual provide a great model for those who seek to develop religiously inspired legal theory.
Hat Tip: TaxProfBlog; Mirror of Justice.
December 26, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality, Tax
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Three on Antitrust
posted by Frank Pasquale
D. Daniel Sokol has been blogging up a storm at the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog. I thought I’d highlight a few things I’d seen there, plus some other sources.
1) The ABA Antitrust Source is out, with a preview of the upcoming Supreme Court term.
2) You can catch the Kirkpatrick Antitrust Conference (on Conservative Economic Influence on U.S. Antitrust Policy) on a webcast that Georgetown is generously providing. (It can also be downloaded via iTunes.)
For a taste of the proceedings, check out my colleague Marina Lao’s careful critique of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Leegin. It will be featured in a forthcoming book, Where the Chicago School Overshot The Mark: Effect of Conservative Economic Analysis on U.S. Antitrust (ed. Robert Pitofsky, Oxford Univ. Press).
3) And for some humor, check out a Rockefeller’s attack on antitrust, reviewed here by Seth Bloom (Senior Counsel on the staff of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee).
December 26, 2007 at 6:50 am
Posted in: Antitrust
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Who Is Frank Pasquale?
posted by Daniel Solove
You know him as Frank Pasquale, as he blogs here occasionally regularly frequently like a madman on steroids, but who is he really?
You might not know that Frank Pasquale recently won a victory in a court case in Texas, In re Does 1-10, — S.W.3d –, 2007 WL 4328204 (Tex. Ct. App., Dec. 12, 2007):
Essent PRMC, L.P. (Hospital) filed suit against ten John Does alleging they had defamed the Hospital and violated other laws by posting comments on an Internet site. The trial court ordered that anonymous contributer John Doe number one be identified by his Internet service provider (ISP). Anonymous John Doe number one (identified in his blog as fac-p and Frank Pasquale) has filed a petition for writ of mandamus asking this Court to order the district court to withdraw its order directing a third party ISP to reveal his identity to the Hospital.
As Frank mentioned earlier, this other Frank Pasquale is his “purloined persona.” Several others commented on the fake Frank and the lawsuit in question. For example, Professor Bill McGeveran wrote:
A Blogger page called “The Paris Site” (cute pun) is a detailed gripe site about the local hospital in Paris, Texas and its parent company, Essent Healthcare. According to this news story in the local Paris paper, Essent has sued the anonymous bloggers behind the site for defamation, alleging that the site suggests the hospital is culpable for Medicare fraud and other wrongdoing. The blogger(s) use various pseudonyms, including, at one point, “Frank Pasquale.” The state court judge in the case has ordered a local ISP to provide the real name and address of the site’s proprietor.
This sort of thing occurs fairly frequently online. On political blogs you often see commenters signing the name of elected officials, usually to parody them by making sarcastic or ridiculous remarks in their name. You also see it all the time on sites like AutoAdmit/XOXOHTH, where part of the style of so-called joke is to use other people’s names (or screen names) and turn them into sock puppets. If obvious enough as humor, those may or may not be misleading, but I have little doubt that this sort of impersonation also happens in many contexts that are outright deceptive.
See also this post by Ruchira Paul.
In the lawsuit, John Doe aka “Frank Pasquale” prevailed, with the court declaring the importance of protecting the First Amendment rights of anonymous speakers. The court adopted the approach in Doe v. Cahill,, 884 A.2d 451 (Del.2005), an approach that I believe is the best. I blogged about Cahill here. According to the court:
December 26, 2007 at 12:05 am
Posted in: Anonymity, First Amendment, Privacy, Weird
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Temple Law Dean Search
posted by Dave Hoffman
I am a member of the Temple Law School Dean Search Committee. In that role, I’m happy to announce that our search is now online, complete with a nifty website and a position specification. I think it is a terrific opportunity, as the law school has had a remarkable run under current Dean Bob Reinstein and is well-positioned to continue to build on its recent success. (Shucks, we even have our own YouTube Channel).
If you are interested in learning more, or in applying, please
December 26, 2007 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)
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The Yale Law Journal, Volume 117, Issue 3 (December 2007)
posted by Yale Law Journal
The Yale Law Journal, Volume 117, Issue 3 (December 2007)
ARTICLES
Consumerism Versus Producerism: A Study in Comparative Law
James Q. Whitman
The Constitution Outside the Constitution
Ernest A. Young
NOTES
Insurance Law’s Hapless Busybody: A Case Against the Insurable Interest Requirement
Jacob Loshin
Concession Agreements: From Private Contract to Public Policy
Nicholas Miranda
December 25, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Posted in: Law Rev (Yale), Law Rev Contents
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Scenes from a Lawyer’s Life
posted by Jeffrey Lipshaw
The Arts Section in today’s New York Times highlights the renewed interest in the work of Diego Rivera, exemplified by a series of exhibitions ongoing in New York. The theme is Rivera’s stepping out from behind the overwhelming interest in his third wife, Frida Kahlo. Our family takes a special interest in all things Rivera and Kahlo as a result of a particular historical interlude: their four year stay in Detroit, beginning in 1929, when, at the behest of Edsel B. Ford, Rivera painted his monumental murals on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
We have hanging in our living room three prints signed by Rivera, part of a collection of ten he gave to my wife’s grandfather, Nathan Milstein, a lawyer in Detroit, who did work for and befriended Rivera and Kahlo. (Family legend has it that Kahlo made a pass at him, but this is unconfirmed.) Nathan was born in 1907, graduated from Detroit Central High School in 1924, and attended the Detroit College of Law (then the Detroit City Law School and now the Michigan State University College of Law) and Wayne University Law School, receiving his LL.B. at age 21 in 1929. Nathan passed away in 2003, having continued to practice until his late eighties, and his seventy-four year tenure as a member of the bar is supposedly one of the longest in Michigan history.
Alene and I spent many hours going through his voluminous files. One truly appreciates the historian’s and the biographer’s art of distilling the story from the data when looking at records like these. The documents are tantalizing. For example, Nathan was a bachelor until 1946, when he married Alene’s grandmother, who was a widow with two children. Before that, he was supporting his mother and sisters. When the war broke out, he tried for years to find a way to serve without being drafted as a private (which in 1941 paid $21 a month, not enough to support the family.) Ultimately he found a job as a civilian flight instructor, but the file of letters and rejections to almost every branch of the military and government agency is about two inches thick. I have framed in my office my personal favorite: the letter signed by John Edgar Hoover advising Nathan he had failed the F.B.I entrance exam, which I had first interpreted as having been on account of Nathan’s being Jewish while taking it.
The Rivera piece inspired me to go back through some of the files this morning (a quiet Christmas task). I realize now it’s entirely likely Hoover objected to Nathan not only because of his ethnicity, but also because he consorted, in the course of his immigration practice, with all sorts of “undesirables,” and espoused public positions to which the F.B.I. director of long memory must have objected.
As to his practice, I’m just now organizing a series of correspondence relating to his representation in late 1932 of one Halvard Lange Bojer, the son of noted Norwegian author, Johan Bojer. The younger Bojer, an engineer who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1928, was working for General Electric in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he was arrested by the Immigration Service, and transported to the Wayne County Jail in Detroit, on the grounds that he was a member of the Communist Party. Bojer himself described it to a reporter as follows: “They tell me that I’m a Communist. . .It so happens that I’m a member of the Communist Party Opposition, whose headquarters is in New York. Members of that Party, though glad to take Moscow’s advice, refuse to take Moscow’s dictation. There are other differences, such as our belief that the worker’s solution is in the organization of a Labor Party, comprised of Trade Unions, similar to that of England. Also, we disbelieve in Moscow’s theory that existing labor organizations, such as the A.F. of L., should be wrecked for the formation of Communist units.” (The Communist Party (Opposition), or the Communist Party (Majority Group) as it was originally called, was a splinter group from the main Communist Party USA, organized by Jay Lovestone. Lovestone shows up here; he visited Detroit, and met with Nathan and Bojer.)
The American Civil Liberties Union was interested in intervening on Bojer’s behalf. On December 12, 1932, Roger Baldwin, the ACLU Director, wrote to Nathan, urging Bojer to fight deportation as a test case. Baldwin stated: “The issue is far more than personal to him. This is the first case, so far as we are aware, when a member of his particular Communist group has been held for deportation on the ground of membership. It is worth fighting through because it offers a test of the application of the law to other than members of the Communist Party.” Nathan met with Bojer in the Wayne County jail, where Bojer, “a very affable and highly cultured young man,” advised that he had no desire to appeal the deportation, and was willing to return to Norway. He was released pursuant to a bond posted by his friends in Fort Wayne, and joined an “East bound deportation party” on December 29, 1932.
As to Nathan’s political views, here’s an excerpt from his tribute to Judge Arthur C. Denison on the occasion of his retirement from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in January, 1932:
Humanizing the enforcement of existing laws relating to admission and deportation of aliens has become a serious problem confronting social leaders throughout the country. In the present delirium of unemployment when a vague terror seizes the nation, this fear is translated into alien hatred. Public discontent must be directed away from the cause of the unrest and to accomplish this, a counter irritant is administered. The ever oppressed alien is again victimized. The term alien becomes synonymous with undesirable. Deportation “drives” and “spectacular raids” then become common occurrences. Wholesale deportation follows as a panacea for what ails the nation. This national hysteria influences the action of public officials and finds expression in more rigid and relentless enforcement of deportation laws. Even the courts are sometimes swept into the whirling cyclone, marring the annals of juridical science with unprecedented decisions. To espouse the cause of the under-privileged requires great courage. Those who bear the courage of their convictions and refuse to be swayed, belong to the school of Holmes and Brandeis. So few do they number that a loss in the ranks is keenly felt by liberty loving citizens.
Just an ordinary kid from an ordinary school in an ordinary city. Whose parents had been aliens.
(Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog.)
December 25, 2007 at 11:22 am
Posted in: Civil Rights, History of Law, Immigration
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A Hope-filled Christmas
posted by Frank Pasquale
It’s always difficult to know exactly how to observe a holiday like Christmas on a blog like this. On the one hand, norms of “public reason” tend toward the neutrality of a “happy holidays” approach. On the other hand, I do celebrate Christmas and have a sense that at least some dimensions of Christianity’s aesthetic and ethical appeal are universal. So I’ll make a brief note of three of that come to mind.
1) The Vatican’s increasing environmental awareness was manifest in the Pope’s midnight mass today, when Benedict XVI lamented “the abuse of energy and its selfish and reckless exploitation.” An eschatological awareness can help us better value a future too easily diminished by standard economic discounting methods.
2) On the aesthetic side, I would trade all the department store carols in the world for a few minutes of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. This podcast organized by the extraordinary Christopher Lydon is a great introduction to Bach’s music.
December 25, 2007 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Religion
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Thoughts on Giving (and a book recommendation)
posted by Deven Desai
So it’s Christmas Eve and for many C is for charity and C is for consumerism too. As Frank points out giving can be difficult in part because so many charities have become huge operations and one may wonder whether the money is going to the programs or to the administrative overhead. CNNMoney has a recent article about how to evaluate a charity. It suggests that 75% of the budget should go to its mission (what I call program) leaving 25% for administrative and fundraising costs (yes it costs money to ask for money). The article recommends Give.org and CharityNavigator.org as sites to see how a group uses funds.
Forbes has a survey of the top 200 charities by assets and efficiency. (TIP: use the sort by feature, not the article links. The links go to a useless slideshow. The sort by takes on to the charts.) Here is the efficiency list. Now it may be that some charities are not that efficient but still pretty good. Forbes suggests that 90% is quite possible and that under 70% is suspect. Remember it takes money to attract talent and raise money. Looking for charities with high efficiency is great but some programs require more in staffing to achieve goals. So another way to look at a charity is whether they offer some sort of metrics. Unlike private enterprise the return will not be as easily quantified. Still by setting goals, evaluating them, and seeing where program may need to change, many charities are better able to raise money. For it is easier to give money if one has a sense that someone is at the helm and making sure that the program is working. It may not succeed on each goal but it is focused on understanding why. In addition the idea of social entrepreneurship (see also The New Heroes) which focuses on a problem and tries to find solutions on a large scale uses some of this approach.
Now for a little consumerism. Someone I consider a friend of Concurring Opinions, Patrick S. O’Donnell, often shares excellent insights and further reading suggestions. In one such comment
Patrick mentioned several items for those interested in inequality and development. One of the mentioned authors is Paul Farmer. Although reading Farmer’s work is worth the time, one may desire something a little different from policy this time of year. As such I recommend Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It details how Dr. Farmer began and continues his impressive work in changing public health systems. So if you want to spend a little holiday money on yourself and want to read a great story that also reveals the problems and some solutions for a major social issue, get the book. I will warn that a friend told me about it, and I hated him for a bit, because I could not put it down and tend to other tasks until I finished.
Ed. Note: Ah yes Frank notes in the comments that one can give to Farmer’s cause at this link. Or I find this link easier for giving directly to Partners in Health.
December 24, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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The Place of Charity
posted by Frank Pasquale
By the way, I don’t want to sound (from my last post) as if I am against all charity. I’m very concerned about the plight of those in LDC’s, and I’ve argued that charitable giving should be something of a moral requirement for many of us in the developed world. As this extraordinary program from Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith shows, charitable giving can help us find a true “moral balance” of sharing, saving, and spending.
Sometimes it is hard to know exactly where one’s contribution will do the most good. Over the past three years I have found many good causes through Global Giving, a group now sponsoring a Giving Challenge. Here are some causes I found compelling enough to give to:
–Safe Water and Latrines for Bangladeshi Slum
–Clean Water for DEPDC’s Underprivileged Children
–Help Feed 200 Neglected Elderly in Guatemala
I’m also happy to report that GG’s president, Mari Kuraishi, recently gave a talk at a conference devoted to figuring out the best ways of assessing the reputation and value of various online entities–including charities. As efforts like these improve, questions about the accountability of charities will become less nagging.
December 24, 2007 at 10:47 am
Posted in: Religion, Tax
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More Davidoff-Ribstein-Lipshaw on the Cerberus-URI Case
posted by Jeffrey Lipshaw
Steve Davidoff over at M&A Law Profs Blog has more on this opinion, about which I posted several days ago, and with Larry Ribstein’s first and second posts, we may have now beaten the three-headed dog of hell to death. But not quite.
I want to address Larry’s suggestion that Chancellor Chandler has issued a warning to lawyers using “notwithstanding” and “subject to” clauses in complex agreements not to do so because they create ambiguities that effectively require the court to go beyond the document to things like the “forthright negotiator” doctrine. That argument depends on the following thought process actually occurring in the mind of a lawyer about to propose a change to an agreement: “Chancellor Chandler in Delaware has suggested that it is inartful drafting to have a syntactical and grammatical correct overriding of a provision where the content of the two provisions is contradictory. Rather than handle the deal-making problem in this way, which is NOT ambiguous, but merely Rube Goldberg-esque (linguistically speaking), I should confront the other side head-on with the issue, recognizing that we may have a purer document. In doing so, I have decided that the risk of this issue being screwed up by a court in the event of litigation weighs more than the risk of doing something to cause the deal not to close (e.g., triggering further discussion of the provision, losing a face-saving way of resolving a disagreement, causing another round of revisions in a time-sensitive environment, etc.)”
It’s an interesting situation where theory, I think, has to give way to practice. My casual empiricism says lawyers make that calculation doing deals all the time, in one form or another, but that the conclusion is almost always to let either difficult construction or even ambiguity stand for fear of wrecking the deal. (That’s the gist of John Coates’ expert report.) If I were to resort to behavioral psychology and economics, I’d suggest that risk aversion accounts for the ex ante choice – between taking the present deal and the risk of either losing the deal or having an adverse outcome in litigation, we select the certainty of doing the deal – and hindsight bias accounts for the ex post analysis.
In my day, I negotiated some of the most arcane and difficult risk splitting provisions possibly in the history of contract drafting – for example, multiple overlapping indemnification buckets for different kinds of risks like environment, patent, product liability, and so on – all on the thesis that getting cash for the business now outweighed the risk that we somehow had either royally screwed up the contract, or that some unknown liability would come crashing down on us in the future. Most deal lawyers never want to look at an agreement once the deal is closed, because as I’ve said, you pays your money and you takes your chances, and just hope to hell that it all works out.
Or as one of the finest deal lawyers I ever knew, my former boss and later colleague at AlliedSignal, Martin Cohen, used to say, when you are selling a business, the best insurance against lawsuits is that the buyer succeeds wildly with it.
December 24, 2007 at 9:42 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Law
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Dental Dilemmas and the Limits of Charity
posted by Frank Pasquale
If states are to the be “laboratories of health care reform,” we should be sure to look not only at pioneers at expanding coverage, but also at what happens to those left behind. For example, Texas has a “has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation, with 20.2% lacking coverage.” Today Ian Urbina of the NYT covers Kentucky’s dental care crisis, where “pain caused by dental problems is a leading cause of missed school days in Kentucky . . . [and] about 1 in 10 state residents are missing all their teeth.” As I suggested a few months ago, the lobbying of the American Dental Association, combined with pathetic Medicaid reimbursement rates, are giving rise to some new tiers of health care for the poor.
When “almost half of the state’s children ages 2 to 4 have untreated cavities,” one response is, of course, old-fashioned DIY ingenuity:
At his private practice, Dr. Smith said that at least once a month he sees a patient who has used Krazy Glue to reattach a broken tooth to the root or to an adjacent tooth. Just as often, he sees patients who have tried to avoid the cost of a dentist by swishing with rubbing alcohol to deal with a tooth infection or by rubbing crushed aspirin pills on gums to numb pain. Both tactics worsen the situation by burning the gums and creating ulcers, he said.
A step above are the “denturists,” unlicensed practitioners who produce dentures designed to make up for the damage almost inevitable in a state where Medicaid reimbursement is 50-65 percent below the market rate. Though they are “allowed to practice independently in Idaho, Maine, Montana, Oregon and Washington,” the ADA is still trying to stamp them out. One can laugh at the strength of, say, a florist cartel, but it’s pretty extraordinary that the ADA both lobbies against the training of more dentists and moves to stop others from filling the resulting gap.
Surely there are some saintly dentists out there working to respond to this problem (I nominate the group (less than a fourth) of Kentucky dentists who “regularly take Medicaid”). But Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt provides some perspective that may lead us to question the role of charity here.
December 24, 2007 at 9:38 am
Posted in: Health Law
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What I Want for Christmas (Sort of)
posted by Deven Desai
Popular Mechanics has a fun piece about a car company called Aptera. It looks cool and is made here in the U.S.A. In fact it is made up the road from me in Carlsbad, CA. The hybrd prototype will cost $30K according to the company. It can get a claimed 300 mpg. The available all electric gets, well it is not mpg, but has a 120 mile range. That one seems like the same problem all electrics had before: short range and need to plug in. Still the vehicle looks like fun. Apparently it handles well too. Why do I want it? Well honestly I love the idea that such a cool car is designed and built in the U.S. The price seems right too. If the company does well I hope some massive U.S. automaker buys them (making the Aptera people as rich as they may deserve to be) and regains some leadership in the car market. In addition, the company and the approach reminds me of the small, dedicated aerospace companies of California’s past. They went on to greatness. Maybe these folks or others like them will enjoy that type of success too. So that is what I really want for Christmas and having the car is just a proxy for the idea. Then again if someone wanted to give me one, I wouldn’t object.
Here’s the video:
December 23, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Posted in: Environmental Law
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Virginia Law Review, 93:8 (December 2007)
posted by Virginia Law Review
VOLUME 93 DECEMBER 2007 ISSUE 8
ARTICLES
| Jurisdictional Exceptionalism |
by Michael G. Collins |
|
by Jennifer E. Rothman |
ESSAYS
|
by Robert J. Jackson, |
|
|
by Anup Malani & |
NOTES
|
by James Zucker |
December 23, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Posted in: Law Rev (Virginia), Law Rev Contents
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Yale Law Journal Pocket Part: The New Voting Rights Act
posted by Yale Law Journal
This week The Pocket Part is publishing the first of two issues discussing Nathaniel Persily’s article, The Promise and Pitfalls of the New Voting Rights Act. In this issue, we present Professor Persily’s summary of his article with responses by Ellen Katz and Richard Pildes.
A forthcoming issue will feature additional responses to Professor Persily’s article. In addition, Professor Persily will respond to the comments on his article and discuss issues raised in a pending constitutional challenge to section 5 of the VRA.
December 23, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Posted in: Law Rev (Yale), Law Rev Forum
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Court Date? But I Have Tickets to the Game. Judge moves trial date to accommodate bowl game
posted by Deven Desai
Like Dave grading has taken over my life for the past few days. I try to take breaks so that seeing the same answer with the same good or bad points is at least a little fresh. The Web of course offers plenty of distractions. This article made my day. Apparently a judge was asked to move the start of a trial because the original date was on the day of the BCS Championship Game. The attorney who made the motion represents an insurance company in a case involving a car crash. He happens to have tickets to game and a floor rented on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter for a tailgate party. The motion refers to Ohio Slowhio and according to the article offered:
All counsel to this matter unequivocally agree that the presence of LSU in the aforementioned contest of pigskin skill unquestionably constitutes good grounds therefor … In fact we have been unable through much imagination and hypothetical scenarios to think of a better reason.
It turns out the plaintiff’s attorneys also have tickets. The judge granted the motion. One thing missing in the story is whether the clients, especially the plaintiff, who may be an individual, agreed to moving the date. The new date has not been set. In some courts moving a date means several weeks not just the next day. Then again it is the Big Easy so perhaps all concerned want to enjoy the food and the game. Trials will occur soon enough, Hmm. Maybe that approach would improve associate life and court procedures. Your honor I really need to see the opening of Book of Secrets. O.K. that is not a good example but you get the idea.
Ed. Note: Bill, thanks for pointing out that it is not the Sugar Bowl. I trusted the article title “Day in court can wait for Sugar Bowl.”
December 23, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Posted in: Culture
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Why the FEC Deadlock?
posted by Frank Pasquale
The WaPo warns that the FEC is about to “shut down.” Though “375 auditors, lawyers and investigators at the FEC will continue to process work already before them, a variety of matters that fall to the commissioners will be placed on hold indefinitely” because of gridlock over President Bush’s effort to appoint Hans Von Spakofsky to a six year term on the commission. Here’s Dahlia Lithwick on Von Spakofsky:
Von Spakovsky’s Senate confirmation hearing last June was noteworthy for many oddities, not the least of which was a letter sent to the rules committee by six former career professionals in the voting rights section of the Justice Department; folks who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations for a period that spanned 36 years. The letter urged the committee to reject von Spakovsky on the grounds that while at DoJ, he was one of the architects of a transformation in the voting rights section from its “historic mission to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section.” The authors named him as the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”
The Lithwick article is worth reading in full, as is the context provided by election law scholar Richard Hasen in Slate stories here and here.
My question is: isn’t there some less controversial nominee than Von Spakofsky? Washington must have a good number of Republican election lawyers who share the president’s priorities and would prove excellent leaders of the Commission.
December 23, 2007 at 9:27 am
Posted in: Administrative Law, First Amendment, Politics
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President Bush on Art. II, Sec. 2
posted by Jeremy Blumenthal
I remember being quite amused at the following New York Times quote, by our President and Commander-in-Chief. It was more than a month ago (11/8), but I don’t recall it eliciting much comment either in the media or the blogosphere. Maybe it’s just me…
“[A]ppearing at George Washington’s mansion in Mount Vernon, Va., with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France[, Mr. Bush said,] ‘You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time.”’
OK. Um, but see U.S. Const., art. II sec. 2.
To be fair, full context of both:
”My message was that we believe strongly in elections, and that you ought to have elections soon, and you need to take off your uniform,” Mr. Bush said later, appearing at George Washington’s mansion in Mount Vernon, Va., with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. ”You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time.”
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The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States….
But I was still amused.
December 22, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Current Events, Humor
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Humanities Hobbled by Copyright Law
posted by Frank Pasquale
While scientists are pioneering exciting new modes of cooperation, humanities scholars are increasingly tripped up by an archaic copyright system. Great schools of the recent past may be doomed to an ownership pattern fractionated enough to frustrate even the most persistent assembler. Mark Bauerlein describes one editor’s struggle to put together an anthology of the “New Critics:”
New Criticism will carry on only if it survives in the classroom, which is to say only if instructors have a handy anthology to assign. They’ll get it in early 2008, when Ohio University Press, in partnership with Swallow Press, issues Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism. . . .
It almost didn’t happen. And the reason why raises broad questions about how humanities fields progress. . . .
December 22, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Intellectual Property, Law and Humanities
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