Each email contained the same information: soliciting is illegal and police want residents [...]]]> Last week I received at least twenty different emails forwarding the same story about a house in my town that was almost burglarized.  A man with a rake who appeared to be looking for work knocked on a front door and realized it was open.  He went to the sidewalk and consulted with his friends.  The owner, who was in the house, locked the door.  After the men returned to the front door and found it locked, they tried to open a back door and then a basement window.  The owner called 911 and the police caught one of the men.  Not exactly high drama, but plenty scary for the owner inside the house.

Each email contained the same information: soliciting is illegal and police want residents to report all solicitors because these individuals might be casing houses.

Almost every email also contained either a subtle or not-so-subtle ratcheting up of the fear.  Some emails lamented that our blocks weren’t safe.  Others warned that criminals need money for the holidays.  One advised that we consider this story as our children start to get older and move around the town without parents.  Another suggested that we watch the movie “Taken” because it would make us rethink letting students travel to Europe.

The upside is that I now know that soliciting is illegal and that the police want me to report it.  I’m also being more careful about locking my doors, a good habit in any event. 

But here’s the downside to this email flurry.   I am discomforted as I move about my town and house in a way that I have never been before.  This is true even though I know about the availability heuristic, i.e., the tendency to think events are more probable if we can recall such an event occurring.  I also know how bad humans are at processing information about low-risk occurrences.   Email  only exacerbates this faulty reasoning.  The Rakeman story is significantly more available to me than it would have been had I heard about it once or twice through old-fashioned word-of-mouth.

Many would argue that discomfort is good.  They are probably right, to a point.  But here is what I would have said if I had allowed myself to respond to all those emails:  Lock your doors.  Be smart.  And relax, because you are a lot safer than you think you are.

Mike is a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago.  He received his A.B. and J.D. from Marquette University, where he was Editor in Chief of the Marquette Law Review.  He also holds an LL.M from Columbia University, where he was named a James Kent Fellow. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Thomas E. Fairchild of the United [...]]]> I’m so pleased to welcome Michael Zimmer as a Concurring Opinions guest for the month of November.   Mike is a widely recognized scholar in the areas of employment discrimination law, labor and employment law and constitutional law.  He is also co-author of one of the first and still the leading employment discrimination casebooks as well as co-author of the first casebook on international and comparative employment law.

Mike is a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago.  He received his A.B. and J.D. from Marquette University, where he was Editor in Chief of the Marquette Law Review.  He also holds an LL.M from Columbia University, where he was named a James Kent Fellow. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Thomas E. Fairchild of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then served as an associate at Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee.

He began his law school teaching career at the University of South Carolina and he has taught at a number of law schools, most recently as a visiting professor of law at Northwestern University. He joined the Seton Hall University School of Law in 1978, served as Associate Dean from 1990 to 1994 and was on the faculty until 2008.

Welcome, Mike!

I’d been trying to figure out why The Good Wife feels so dated, even though Alicia’s family is a victim of the 24-hour news cycle and her kids are extremely wired.  Then it hit me—the law firm is way too pre-2008.  The associates [...]]]> On the heels of posts about television legal dramas by Jonathan Siegel and Jon Ip, consider The Good Wife, now airing on CBS.  (I haven’t yet watched this week’s episode, so no spoilers here.)  The show is mostly about a wife dealing with the very public revelation that her elected-official husband frequented prostitutes.  This storyline is good and the reason I’m still watching.  But Alicia is an associate at a Chicago law firm and quite a bit of the show takes place there.

I’d been trying to figure out why The Good Wife feels so dated, even though Alicia’s family is a victim of the 24-hour news cycle and her kids are extremely wired.  Then it hit me—the law firm is way too pre-2008.  The associates are given a stern lecture about needing to increase billable hours.  Where’s the angst about the viability of billable hours and the future of the law firm business model?  Moreover, doesn’t the lecture mean that the firm has excess work and is just lacking someone who will step up and do it?  There’s a passing reference to the firm hiring more associates than it will need over the long term, but where are the rescinded offers and the cancelled summer program?   The writers need to start reading Above the Law and borrowing liberally.

Granted, television rarely provides a realistic look at how law firms really work.  (See Ally McBeal.)  I do hope, however, that The Good Wife doesn’t inspire too many would-be law students.  These attorneys are way, way too comfortable.

Enter Ron Huberman, the new chief officer of Chicago public schools.  He has a plan to stop the killing, one that is based on an analysis [...]]]> The new chief officer of Chicago public schools has a fresh strategy for preventing the killings of public school students.  Such killings occur with alarming regularity; 67 since the start of the 2007 -2008 academic year.  If this doesn’t sound bad enough, the 67 doesn’t include the hundreds of students who were shot or beaten but managed to survive.  Right now Derrion Albert—the football player and honor student who was beaten to death when he got caught between rival gangs—is dominating the headlines.  But anyone who lives in Chicago expects that we’ll soon know another name.  The violence is relentless.

Enter Ron Huberman, the new chief officer of Chicago public schools.  He has a plan to stop the killing, one that is based on an analysis of more than 500 students who were attacked.   The plan might work, provided that Chicago is able to resist its inevitable temptations.

As Susan Saulny summarized in the New York Times,

Officials know that deadly violent outbursts are not truly random. The students at the highest risk of violence, by statistics, are most likely to be black, male, without a stable living environment, in special education, skipping an average of 42 percent of school days at neighborhood and alternative schools, and having a record of in-school behavioral flare-ups that is about eight times higher than the average student.

The analysis of student attacks also show that they typically happened beyond a two-hour window from the start and end of school — that is, late at night or very early in the morning — and blocks away from school grounds, where neighborhood boundaries press against one another.

 Huberman plans to spend $30 million on the 10,000 students whose profiles suggest that they are most at risk.  Chicago is aiming to radically intervene in the lives of these students in ways that “favor mental health strategies and prevention over policing and punishment.”  The goal is to create meaningful relationships with adults and to give each student a part-time job.  All of this requires coordination between the schools, the Police Department, the Department of Children and Family Services, and local community groups.  Chicago is also “becoming more strategic about providing safe passage to school by increasing police enforcement and by keeping tabs on gang and clique activities in real time as their turf wars hopscotch around school catchment areas.”

Chicago’s plan is an application of problem-oriented policing, which Professor Herman Goldstein pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s.  At root, problem-oriented policing calls on police to increase their understanding of the conditions that create community problems and to understand seemingly discrete events as related incidents that share common characteristics.

Consider this description of problem-oriented policing, taken from Michael Scott’s Problem-Oriented Policing, Reflections on the First 20 Years:

Under a problem-oriented policing approach, the police would recognize how functions like moral education, youth recreation and charity are integral to public safety, but would not see their role as one of providing these services directly, at least not permanently.  The key for the police is first, to establish some sense of ownership or responsibility for a community problem, and if the problem falls within the police mandate, either address it themselves, [or] broker ownership to some other entity. . . .  The police may join with many divergent entities in studying a problem, but ultimately the responsibilities for various responses should be apportioned among those entities according to their resources and competencies. 

Problem-oriented policing can yield extraordinary results.  One classic example is how New York City was able to clean up its subway system after closely studying the problem of vandalism and implementing responses that ranged from changing the way that spray paint was sold to immediately taking defaced cars out of service.  The work of Michael Scott and others provides additional examples.

As the New York Times noted and Huberman recognizes, kids have “to bite” in order for Chicago’s new approach to work.  This is the part that makes me nervous.  A problem-oriented intervention sometimes morphs into a traditional law and order approach.  Again New York City provides an example.  Rudy Giuliani may have described himself as subscribing to broken windows—that is, as cracking down on quality-of-life offenses to provide a sense of order that would discourage more serious crimes—but the quality-of-life crackdown also provided a pretext for making arrests that led to bigger collars and ultimately worsened relationships between the police and minority communities. 

The 10,000 kids at the heart of Huberman’s plan will have myriad connections to the neighborhood gangs that Chicago would like to break up or see unravel.  Many of the kids will have information that the Chicago police department would find enormously useful.  But unless Chicago resists the temptation to try to use these meaningful relationships to make bigger collars, the kids won’t bite.  Then Huberman’s smart plan will become another failed effort.

I’ve always had difficulty teaching the Barnes saga because doing so requires that I separate my unbridled enthusiasm for the place from a more scholarly discussion about the appropriate limits of deadhand control.  But it’s also difficult to explain to students what moving the Barnes means when most have never visited the foundation. 

This year, I’ll be helped along considerably by comparing these pictures of the current gallery 

with these renderings of the new facility planned for downtown Philadelphia.

You can see other representations of the planned gallery here, courtesy of the New York Times.

In the note, the casebook authors describe Stephanie Lester’s 2007 study of more than 120 Australian cases in which the court used the dispensing power, i.e., probated a document which had not been executed in compliance with the formalities because clear and convincing evidence showed that the decedent intended the document to be [...]]]> This semester I began using the just-released 8th edition of Dukeminier’s Wills, Trusts, and Estates.  Five weeks into the semester, I’m pleased with this latest revision, primarily because some chapters have been reorganized in ways that are much more consistent with how I actually teach the course, which means that the students spend less time hopping between cases.  One new note, however, has needled me into reconsidering the 1990 Uniform Probate Code, particularly as amended in 2008.

In the note, the casebook authors describe Stephanie Lester’s 2007 study of more than 120 Australian cases in which the court used the dispensing power, i.e., probated a document which had not been executed in compliance with the formalities because clear and convincing evidence showed that the decedent intended the document to be a will.   The casebook authors provide this summary of Lester’s work:  “[Lester] concluded that the dispensing power has continued to fare well—with one exception.  In a troubling number of cases, the court admitted a document to probate despite evidence that the document was not intended to be a will but for which there was good evidence of whom the decedent wanted to benefit.”  (For an American case of the same stripe, see In re Estate of Kuralt, where the court probated as a holographic codicil a letter stating that the ailing Kuralt would have a “lawyer visit the hospital to be sure you inherit the rest of the place in MT.”  (emphasis by Kuralt). 

My reaction to this trend is twofold: (1) if it is troubling, it’s not surprising, and (2) is it really troubling?

First, the predictability of this latest development.  The 1990 UPC and its subsequent amendments are aimed at making wills easier and easier to write.  As an example, see the revised section 2-502, which allows testators to use a notary instead of two witnesses.  The 1990 UPC also authorizes the dispensing power that Lester studied.  Couple the loosening up of the formalities with the dispensing power and it’s not that great a leap to probating a document that clearly and convincingly shows whom the decedent wanted to benefit after death, even if the decedent did not perceive of that document as a will.

Second, and more important, is this new development really troubling?  I admit that the Estates and Trusts professor in me cringes each time I teach Kuralt.  If one talks about the formalities long enough (even the loosened-up kind), they tend to take on a significance of their own. But many of my students seem unbothered by Kuralt, and not because they think the decedent actually wrote a codicil.  If the alternative to probating the not-a-will is intestacy or some other result that we are convinced the decedent wouldn’t want, why not probate the document that reflects what the decedent wanted to happen to her property?  When we talk about the importance of decedent intent, isn’t the penultimate question “Whom does the decedent wish to benefit?”

You can find more details here.

This year the NALP standards will frustrate law firms and 2Ls alike.   First, consider the standards from [...]]]> With 2Ls facing a notably dismal summer job market, I’m wondering whether NALP’s “general standards for the timing of offers and decisions” finally will implode. For 2L summer hiring, NALP states that firms with more than 40 lawyers “should leave . . . offers open for at least 45 days following the date of the offer letter or until December 30, whichever comes first.”  Second year students  “should not hold open more than five offers of employment at any one time.  For each offer received that places a candidate over the offer limit, the candidate should, within one week of receipt of the excess offer, release an offer. ”

This year the NALP standards will frustrate law firms and 2Ls alike.   First, consider the standards from the perspective of a prestigious-but-not-quite-as-prestigious law firm.  They know that their competitors higher up on the food chain will hire fewer 2Ls this year and that 2Ls know this as well.  If the prestigious-but-not-quite-as-prestigious law firm wanted to make a play for a top student, an exploding offer would be a darn good strategy.  Nothing like the worst economy since the Great Depression to make even stellar students appreciate a bird in hand. 

Of course, law schools might forbid a firm that violated the NALP standards from on-campus interviewing in future years.  Or law schools might look the other way, in part because schools promote themselves among prospective students by having a very long list of firms that interview on campus.  One can also imagine informal agreements not to abide by the NALP standards among  law firms in a particular region.   Only the best law schools could afford to ban them all. 

Now consider all of this from the prospective of a 2L who wants a job at, say, Cravath. In a different hiring year, she eventually would have received an offer from Cravath, although not in their first round.  This year, however, the job market is such that most of the  students who get first-round offers from Cravath never receive more than five offers, so they are able to hang onto their Cravath offers for the full 45 days.  Meanwhile, the 2L who is gunning for Cravath has to accept an offer from a different firm, because she has run up against her own 45 day deadline.   

One fair response to this last scenario is that in today’s market, no saavy student is going to hold on to an offer for 45 days; instead, the student will simply accept.  But that just highlights that NALP will become increasingly irrelevant as its standards continue to reflect what the 2L market used to look like, instead of what it looks like today.

You can find good articles about Adderrall and other [...]]]> After a summer where I encountered multiple media accounts about the off-label uses of  Adderrall and other ADHD drugs, I have a new appreciation for the conundrum of elite athletes and their fans.  Was that A+ Trusts and Estates exam just the result of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement?  Is the student who seems particularly focused taking something?  Or (and this is worse) do the colleagues with whom I compete not share my fear of  sprouting antlers or dropping dead because of off-label use? Or (and immediacy makes this worse still) is Adderrall my route to having that paper done by the spring submission window?  If it is, what should I be considering?  That Jack Kerouac’s excessive use of Benzedrine, another mental stimulant, helped him write On the Road or that it eventually put him in the hospital with thrombophlebitis?

You can find good articles about Adderrall and other cognitive enhancers here, here and here.

Kathleen’s most recent article is Monitoring Corporate Corruption: DOJ’s Use of [...]]]> Associate Dean and Professor Kathleen Boozang is a health law expert at Seton Hall Law School.  While much of her scholarly career has focused on nonprofit hospital governance issues, she has expanded her research and teaching more recently to explore the legal and policy issues related to the global pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Kathleen oversees Seton Hall’s Gibbons Institute of Law, Science and Technology, as well as its Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law & Policy.  Her recent work at the Center includes a Whitepaper critiquing the practices employed by industry to promote their products to physicians, recommending, inter alia, a ban on industry gifts to physicians, and independence of continuing medical education from industry funding.

Kathleen’s most recent article is Monitoring Corporate Corruption: DOJ’s Use of Deferred Prosecution Agreements in Health Care, 35 Am. J. L. Med. 89 (2009) (with Simone Handler-Hutchinson).  Other particularly noteworthy pieces include Does Director Independence Improve Nonprofit Governance?, 75 Tenn.L Rev 83 (2007) and The Survival of Religious Hospitals in a World of Reformed Health Care, 31 Houston L. Rev. 1429 (1995).  Kathleen also blogs regularly at Health Reform Watch.

Kathleen graduated from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Mo. and received her L.L.M. from Yale Law School.

First, the science.  Clinical trials in Africa have found that circumcision reduces a heterosexual man’s risk of contracting HIV from an infected female by up to 60 percent.  It is unclear whether circumcision reduces the risk that a woman will contract HIV from an infected male and “little [...]]]> Both The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are considering whether to recommend routine infant male circumcision as a means of reducing the spread of HIV.  For me, the debate is a reminder of how the medical practice is deeply intertwined with societal norms.   One example illustrates the point:  American-born parents would dismiss as ridiculous (or worse) the suggestion that they cut off part of their infant daughter’s clitoris to help prevent HIV.

First, the science.  Clinical trials in Africa have found that circumcision reduces a heterosexual man’s risk of contracting HIV from an infected female by up to 60 percent.  It is unclear whether circumcision reduces the risk that a woman will contract HIV from an infected male and “little to no evidence” that it reduces the spread of HIV between homosexual male partners.  But if circumcision reduces the overall prevalence of HIV among heterosexual males, that might ultimately lower the risk among other populations, particularly women.   As for why circumcision status matters, most likely the foreskin tissue is more susceptible to HIV than other parts of the penis.   (You can read more about the science here.)

Circumcision opponents argue that at most circumcision reduces risk.   It does not prevent infection and no-one would suggest that circumcised males do not need condoms.    They further argue that HIV spread patterns are different in the United States than in the parts of Africa where the studies were conducted; that American and African health systems are worlds apart; and that  homosexual males are the individuals most at risk in the United States.   They can also point to studies which challenge or contradict the finding that circumcision reduces the risk of a heterosexual male contracting HIV from an infected female.  At present, however, opponents of circumcision appear to be losing the medical battle. 

All of this must be terribly frustrating for those who advocate non-circumcision.   First, they are well aware of the American medical establishment’s history of promoting circumcision as a means of combating a variety of conditions (my own favorites are the Victorian examples of bowleggedness and masturbation).   Second, in recent decades circumcision opponents have achieved some  partial victories.  The current AAP recommendations are neutral on the question whether to  circumcise infant males .  The national circumcision rate has fallen to less than 65 percent from a high of more than 80 percent, with rates far below 50 percent in a few Western states.   The cumulative result of many different policies that have the effect of discouraging circumcision—most notably, the refusal of many insurance companies to pay for the procedure—meant that non-circumcision may have been creeping, slowly, toward a tipping point.  Indeed, this post originally had a sentence about how a woman of my demographic (white, Midwestern) was statistically unlikely to ever have seen an uncircumcised penis.  But then I realized that I have seen some in recent years, in the locker room at my gym where many mothers dress their young sons.   

The conundrum for advocates of  non-circumcision is that it is possible to acknowledge that circumcision reduces the risk of  HIV infection, but still argue that the procedure should not be routinely performed on all infants.  But this argument is a non-starter unless the listener is really willing to consider that infant circumcision is painful and traumatic, that it changes the male sexual experience, and that there is always a chance, however remote, that the physician will botch the procedure.   In a country where more than 60 percent of infant males are still routinely circumcised, our inclination is to dismiss these arguments.  If legitimate, then what have we been doing to our children?

As I have written about elsewhere, parents who are deciding whether to circumcise care more about the social aspects of the practice than about its medical effects.   The circumcision status of other males in the infant’s family matters a lot to American parents, as does whether boys in a locker room are likely to see circumcised or uncircumcised penises.   Circumcision opponents should be fearful of what the CDC and AAP is likely to recommend, but not simply because these organizations may promote circumcision.  Rather, the medical recommendation will reinforce the still-prevailing societal norm.  Some parents who are conflicted about the practice will ultimately decide to circumcise their boys  because of the medical recommendation alone.   But more are likely to consider the recommendation and predict that other parents will circumcise and thus that they should as well, lest their child be the odd man out.   Meanwhile, parents who were inclined to circumcise will be even more steadfast about the medical correctness of their decision.  All of this makes it extremely unlikely that the norm will tip in favor of non-circumcision.

As the Journal explained:

So what don’t the politicians like?  Apparently, it’s merely the profits.  [One advisor to Governor Jon Corzine] told the Newark Star Ledger that the schools should reduce their earnings by offering more student aid.  [An Ohio Board of Regent] told state legislators that “it is simply untenable for . . . [...]]]> For-profit colleges such as Devry and Kaplan are coming under increased scrutiny by federal and state governments.  According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Education is considering changes that might result in students at for-profit colleges having less access to federal aid.  Meanwhile, Ohio’s governor and state legislature have agreed to eliminate the scholarships of 22,500 students attending for-profit colleges.  Next year New Jersey will reduce the aid of students at these colleges by almost 40 percent. 

As the Journal explained:

So what don’t the politicians like?  Apparently, it’s merely the profits.  [One advisor to Governor Jon Corzine] told the Newark Star Ledger that the schools should reduce their earnings by offering more student aid.  [An Ohio Board of Regent] told state legislators that “it is simply untenable for . . . a publicly or privately held company, seeking the maxium return for their owners [to] set tuition in a manner that is designed to maximize the public dollars that they receive and then expect taxpayers to pay the bill.”

This debate reminds of Dan Pallotta’s Uncharitable: How Restraints on NonProfits Undermine Their Potential, which was published in 2008.  Pallotta argues that deeply-rooted notions of charitableness constrain risk-taking, capital investment, advertising, and employee compensation within the non-profit sector and thereby make non-profits far less effective than they otherwise would be.  Pallotta argues that the fundamental question should be how much good or value the entity creates, not whether the vehicle creating the good earns a profit or otherwise serves individual self-interest.   Running throughout Uncharitable is a case study of  Pallotta TeamWorks, which organized events that netted enormous amounts for AIDS and breast cancer research, but which ultimately folded in part because the charitable organizations with which it contracted did not want to be associated with a for-profit venture.  While Uncharitable sometimes reads like a defense of Pallotta’s failed business, its central argument is convincing and the book has received many favorable reviews.

Taking a page from Pallotta’s book, the debate about colleges like Devry and Kaplan should not focus on profits but instead on the relative good these colleges create.  The Journal article suggests that for-profit colleges fare well on many fronts, including curriculums that are particularly well-suited for the information economy and graduation rates that are higher than those at non-profit competitors.  There may be reason to criticize for-profit colleges, but such criticism should be based on the relative value of the education they provide, not on the mere existence of profits.

1.  I remain baffled about what benefit the plaintiffs (graduates of out-of-state law schools)  expect to receive from this suit.  They have asked for an injunctive order striking a few words from the Wisconsin Supreme Court rule on bar admission.  The result of this proposed edit is that Wisconsin would offer the diploma privilege to all graduates of ABA-accredited law schools.  But as Judge Posner pointed out in his opinion, the state could also remedy a commerce clause violation by requiring graduates of Wisconsin law schools to take the bar exam.  Does [...]]]> Yesterday the Seventh Circuit reversed the dismissal of the class action challenging Wisconsin’s diploma privilege as a violation of the commerce clause.  (I previously posted about the case here. ) A few thoughts about this latest development:

1.  I remain baffled about what benefit the plaintiffs (graduates of out-of-state law schools)  expect to receive from this suit.  They have asked for an injunctive order striking a few words from the Wisconsin Supreme Court rule on bar admission.  The result of this proposed edit is that Wisconsin would offer the diploma privilege to all graduates of ABA-accredited law schools.  But as Judge Posner pointed out in his opinion, the state could also remedy a commerce clause violation by requiring graduates of Wisconsin law schools to take the bar exam.  Does anyone really believe that Wisconsin would do anything other than what Judge Posner has suggested?  Talk about the potential for a quick race to the bottom!  Even if they are victorious, the plaintiffs will be in the same position as when they started:  they will have to take a bar exam to practice in Wisconsin (or practice in another state for five years).

2. Judge Posner referred to the diploma privilege as favoring the economic interests of Wisconsin law schools, because prospective students who want to practice in Wisconsin have an incentive to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison or Marquette.  This is undoubtedly true in theory, but I wonder how many applicants this incentive actually yields.   First, how many people dream of practicing law in Wisconsin who don’t already have a connection to the state?  I suspect that most people who plan to practice in Wisconsin are already living there or grew up there and would like to return.  This would make an application to Madison or Marquette likely in any event (particularly an application to Madison, which offers an in-state tuition discount).   Second, prospective law students tend to be extraordinarily optimistic about their potential for academic success and, by extension, their ability to pass a bar exam.  The exam is also more than three years removed from the decision about where to attend law school.  While the diploma privilege may occasionally tip the scale, I suspect most applicants make their decision based on more immediate factors:  prestige, physical plant, cost,  location, etc.  I doubt that the diploma privilege attracts many additional applicants to Wisconsin law schools or discourages many applicants who would like to eventually practice in Wisconsin from attending an out-of-state school.

3.  As the case returns to the district court, the most important question is whether the state can prove that Madison and Marquette offer courses that teach Wisconsin law and are therefore different than courses offered at other ABA-approved law schools.  At oral argument, Judges Posner and Wood were quite skeptical that the state would be able to offer this proof.  (Gordon Smith, a former Madison professor, blogged about this here.)  While I cannot speak about Marquette or about the current state of affairs at Madison, I am confident that 12 years ago (when I was a law student) Madison would have been able to satisfy the court.  Were my antitrust or federal courts courses different than what was offered at other schools?  No.  But in the courses that were necessary to qualify for the diploma privilege, I learned a lot of Wisconsin law, even when my professors chose to use national textbooks instead of their own materials.  Gordon Smith wrote that the faculty at Madison have “an unusually strong attachment to the home state’s law.”  When I was a student, I would have described it a bit differently:  I thought the faculty perceived itself as having an obligation to teach Wisconsin law because it knew that students who remained in the state would not take the bar exam.

Last week, a toll road outside Denver and another outside Dallas went cashless.  Drivers on E-470  and the President George Bush Turnpike will have to attach transponders to their cars or pay a fee when their bill arrives in the mail.   The move toward cashless toll roads has been a long time coming, as Professor Erik Lillquist and I discuss in this article about the ways in which government encourages the use of new technologies.  In Denver, for instance, 30% of drivers used transponders when they were first introduced in 1991; by 2009, 75% of drivers used them.

Electronic tolling has been a win for both drivers and toll authorities.  Drivers with transponders enjoy a quicker ride, while the authorities who run the toll roads save on [...]]]>  

Last week, a toll road outside Denver and another outside Dallas went cashless.  Drivers on E-470  and the President George Bush Turnpike will have to attach transponders to their cars or pay a fee when their bill arrives in the mail.   The move toward cashless toll roads has been a long time coming, as Professor Erik Lillquist and I discuss in this article about the ways in which government encourages the use of new technologies.  In Denver, for instance, 30% of drivers used transponders when they were first introduced in 1991; by 2009, 75% of drivers used them.

Electronic tolling has been a win for both drivers and toll authorities.  Drivers with transponders enjoy a quicker ride, while the authorities who run the toll roads save on labor costs.  Electronic tolling also reduces vehicle emissions and accidents in the vicinity of tolling stations. 

For the last decade or more, the challenge for tolling authorities has been convincing drivers to incur the hassle costs of obtaining a transponder and establishing an account from which tolls can be deducted.  As an incentive for participation, authorities offered the ability to zoom through tolling stations and, in some instances, lower tolls for electronic customers.  Now electronic tolling has apparently reached the tipping point.  In addition to the roads outside of Denver and Dallas, the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority is converting five of its expressways  to electronic-only tolling.  The highway that  will connect Prince George’s and Montgomery counties will also be cashless.

Drivers had better enjoy the convenience of electronic tolling, as the days of lower tolls for electronic customers are apparently over.  The Wall Street Journal is reporting that some researchers expect tolls on electronic-only roads to be higher than on roads that offer a cash option.  Amy Finkelstein, a professor at MIT, suggests that electronic tolling results in tolls that are 20 to 40 percent higher than they would otherwise be.   Apparently it’s easier for authorities to raise rates when the toll is just automatically deducted from the driver’s account than when the driver has to toss coins into a hamper or feed dollars into a cash reader.

So drivers should beware.  The moment of payment may be intangible, but the money deducted from their accounts is real.

To prepare for a trip to Harry Potter: The Exhibition (now at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry), my daughter and I had a Harry Potter movie marathon.   It left me wondering:  if newspapers really do die, how are filmmakers going to quickly summarize events and move on to the next part of the plot?   Those images of the Daily Prophet would lose all their punch if they were scrolling across a computer.  Kind of like what would have happened to Raiders of the Lost Ark if Spielberg had to use MapQuest to show us where Indy was heading next .  . .  .