In thinking last night about the issues raised in one of my first posts here as a guest blogger, I started looking for additional examples of the persistence of digital artifacts. In running my searches, I came across other issues raised by the persistence, plasticity, and ease of digitally copying image and video files ("other" in relation to my main concern, the effects of persistence on young people), mainly involving advertising and the use (or misuse) of digital technology.
It should be fairly obvious that there are lots of sites on the Internet that focus on media issues, and they often make copies and mirrors of mistakes made in whatever area they focus on. One site in particular made me think and laugh. For example, Microsoft is having PR problems right now for running an image in an advertisement in the US that contained a woman, an asian man, and a black man, and then running the same ad in Poland with the black man's head "Photoshopped" (it's a verb, I swear, and though Adobe doesn't like it, they do it, too) and replaced with that of a white man (but they didn't bother to replace his hand). Stories here, here and here, with original images; the images are also here (via slashdot) with links to the ad pages. As some of the stories note, Microsoft has since apologized and is now using only the original image. But the photoshopped image is, of course, still widely available.
The site I'm talking about is PhotoShopDisasters, and it's worth scrolling down to see photos that include Jennifer Lopez's baby with an arm mistakenly PhotoShopped onto its head, a man walking holding hands with someone who doesn't appear in the photo (just the hand appears intertwined with his), and a CD the size of an LP (maybe the ad company was feeling nostalgic for the good old days of LPs).
As PhotoShopDisasters says, "Nobody will notice? WE ARE THAT NOBODY!" A good lesson to learn when thinking about what you make available -- especially online -- in this day and age.
The bank failures are coming fast and furious (and large)
now – a poor blawger can barely keep up. In my last post on bank failures, Bank
Failures Update And Future Problem Banks, I noted that the total number of
FDIC bank closures for the year was at 72, putting us on pace for an estimated
125-150 FDIC bank closures for 2009.
Since then, the FDIC has closed nine more banks, bringing
the total for 2009 to 81. See here
for the FDIC's full list of failed banks since October 1, 2000. The FDIC
has been seizing about 4 to 5 banks per week recently, putting us on pace for close to 150 bank failures for 2009. See the chart at right, courtesy of Calculated
Risk.(Click on any chart to
enlarge.)
Richard
Bove, a prominent banking analyst, predicts that "perhaps another 150
to 200 banks will fail," on top of the 81 so far in 2009, adding stress to
the FDIC's deposit insurance fund.In the video below, Meredith Whitney predicts that, improved economic
fundamentals notwithstanding, we are still early in the bank failures cycle,
and will see bank failures top 300 before the end of this cycle (which Calculated
Risk believes is too low an estimate).
The current pace of bank failures is causing some strain to
the FDICs deposit insurance fund and to the financial system as a whole.From Reuters:
Richard Bove of Rochdale Securities
said this will likely force the FDIC, which insures deposits, to turn
increasingly to non-U.S. banks and private equity funds to shore up the banking
system.
"The difficulty at the moment is
finding enough healthy banks to buy the failing banks," Bove wrote.
The FDIC is expected on August 26 to
vote on relaxed guidelines for private equity firms to invest in failed banks,
after critics said previously proposed rules were too harsh and would actually
dissuade firms from making investments. . . .
Three large failures this year --
BankUnited Financial Corp in May, and Colonial BancGroup Inc, Guaranty
Financial Group Inc in August -- collectively cost the fund roughly $10.7
billion.
The fund had $13 billion at the end of
March.
Regulators closed Guaranty's banking
unit on Friday and sold assets of the Texas-based lender to Banco Bilbao
Vizcaya Argentaria SA. The FDIC agreed to share in losses with the Spanish
bank.
Bove said the FDIC will likely levy
special assessments against banks in the fourth quarter of this year and second
quarter of 2010.
He said these assessments could total
$11 billion in 2010, on top of the same amount of regular assessments.
"FDIC premiums could be 25 percent of the industry's pretax income,"
he wrote.
This second graph from Calculated Risk shows the cumulative
estimated losses to the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) and the quarterly
assets of the DIF (as reported by the FDIC). (The FDIC takes reserves against future losses in the DIF,
and collects fees and special assessments - so you can't just subtract
estimated losses from assets to determine the assets remaining in the DIF.)
In a prior post, Bank
Failures in Historical Perspective, I compared the current pace of bank
failures to the pace during the S&L crisis and the great depression. At the current rate, bank failures in
2009 will outpace the early years of the S&L crisis. From 1982 thorough
1984 there were about 100 failures per year.After that, the number of failures rapidly increased, as shown
in this third graph, also from Calculated
Risk.
As the chart demonstrates, bank closures were far more
numerous during both the Savings & Loan Crisis and during the 1920s and
early 1930s, before the FDIC was created in 1933.For example, the number of bank failures is estimated at
4000 for the year 1933, and 500 bank failures per year was commonly seen during
the 1920’s.As I’ve noted in prior
posts, the number of bank failures alone does not tell the whole story of
distress from bank failures, which is a function of the total number of existing
banks, the size of their assets and liabilities, the number of branches, and
other factors. Nor do bank closures paint the whole picture of economic crisis
– in the current financial crisis, many of the most spectacular failures or
bailouts have been of non-bank financial institutions.
To get at some of these questions, Calculated Risk has a List
of Failed Banks since 2007, which includes assets and estimated losses.Finally, for those wanting a peek into
the future, see this unofficial List
of Problem Banks.
We're very pleased to welcome Eric Fink as a guest blogger here at the Faculty Lounge. Eric is an Associate Professor at Elon School of Law. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins, the London School of Economics, and NYU Law School. He was a Lecturer in Law at Stanford before joining the Elon faculty in 2007. His publications include:
PostRealism, or the Jurisprudential Logic of Late Capitalism: A SocioLegal Analysis of the Rise and Diffusion of Law and Economics, 55 Hastings Law Journal 931
As I predicted in my last
post on this topic, Richard Posner’s current dispute with the macroeconomists
continues to provide entertainment and, perhaps, education (at least for me).For example, in a third
post on Friday on the topic, Posner notes that his two prior blog entries
(discussed in the Lounge here)
“about Christina Romer's August 6 speech on the stimulus package have drawn an
unusual amount of commentary, including criticisms (some by seemingly reputable
economists) that are at once obtuse and vitriolic,” and further argues that “Mark
Thoma, who like DeLong is notably abusive, resorts to the academic trick of
reading a passage literally in order to make the author seem an ignoramus.”The post goes on to further discuss the
Romer speech and her prior academic work, and to address other critics.
For their part, Paul Krugman,
Brad
DeLong, and Menzie
Chinn, among others, continue to dispute Posner’s allegations and challenge
his expertise, analysis, and ethics.However, I found this
post by Robert Waldman to be the most interesting, because it’s primarily about
academic in-fighting and mutual contempt, and you know we love that type of
thing here.The post is long and
my edited version no doubt leaves out important relevant nuances, so read the
whole thing to get the full picture:
I
think the problem is partly that the economics profession is divided into
schools of thought -- roughly fresh water and salt water -- with profound
contempt for each other (although salt water economists such as C. Romer, D.
Romer and N.G. Mankiw tend to be polite in public).
I
think it very likely that Romer's speach [sic] and her academic work is
considered to be not* "responsible academic analysis" by top
economists working at the economics departments of the Universities of Chicago
and Minnesota.. . .
Some
(Thoma mostly) suggest that Posner is showing contempt for the economics
profession assuming a lawyer, law professor, judge and top notch microeconomist
can handle macro without brushing up on the terminology. My guess is nearly the
opposite. I suspect that he is in contact with macro economists who share his
view of Romer's speech and that this made him sure he is on safe ground. . . .
I
think Posner genuinely doesn't know that a large fraction of the economics
profession agrees with Romer's approach.
The
fact is that top fresh water economists think they are the only top notch
economists and dismiss salt water economists including the ones with Nobel
prizes and stuff.
Well, hopefully they won’t all get tired and stop arguing
after that.This has been fun, and
without such diversions I might be forced to prepare for the new semester.
One of the quiet heroines of the ABA accreditation process,
Judge Andree Roaf, recently passed away. Judge Roaf was the first
African-American woman to serve as a justice on the Arkansas Supreme
Court.She thoughtfully brought
her experiences as a non-traditional student, small-firm lawyer and
distinguished appellate judge to the accreditation program.
Accreditation of law schools by the ABA is based on a joint
venture among legal academics, practicing lawyers, bar examiners, and
judges.The contributions of hundreds of
hours of service by judges and practicing lawyers, who have little or no self
interest in the process, is pro bono activity at its best.The perspectives judges and practicing
lawyers bring to ABA accreditation is incredibly enriching.Judges and practitioners provide legal
academics with key feedback about the structure and content of our programs and
have pressed legal academics to take seriously the teaching of both theory and
practice.
Judge Roaf’s passion for increasing the ABA’s commitment to
diversity in legal education was deeply informed by her life experience as an
African-American.As legal realists we
all know a judge’s perspective counts.Those of us who knew Judge Roaf will profoundly miss hearing her wise
world view.
For a small fee, of course.Via Tyler
Cowen, two websites -- Eternal Earth-Bound
Pets, USA and JesusPets
– that promise a service in which atheists who are also animal-lovers agree to
care for the pets of those taken in the
rapture.
From Eternal Earth-Bound Pets:
You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're
saved.But when the Rapture comes
what's to become of your loving pets who are left behind?Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes
that burden off your mind.
We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each
Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will
still be here on Earth after you've received your reward.Our network of animal activists are
committed to step in when you step up to Jesus.
We are currently active in 20 states and growing.Our representatives have been screened
to ensure that they are atheists, animal lovers, are moral / ethical with no
criminal background, have the ability and desire to rescue your pet and the
means to retrieve them and ensure their care for your pet's natural life.. . .
Our service is plain and simple; our fee structure is
reasonable.
For $110.00 we will guarantee that should the Rapture occur
within ten (10) years of receipt of payment, one pet per residence will be
saved.Each additional pet at your
residence will be saved for an additional $15.00 fee.A small price to pay for your peace of mind and the
health and safety of your four legged friends.
Unfortunately at this
time we are not equipped to accommodate all species and must limit our services
to dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, and small caged mammals.
If
Jesus returns tonight, who will feed your pets tomorrow?
Make
hard CA$H from home while the world is in flames!
Are
you an animal lover; and also an atheist, agnostic, jew, muslim, or other
non-Christian? If so, you might qualify for the JesusPets Partner Program!
JesusPets
will pay YOU to take care of dogs, cats, and other pets. To qualify, you must
agree with this statement:
The
JesusPets Partner Program Statement
I
love animals, and am willing to care for pets after the Christian Rapture.
I
am not, and never have been a born-again Christian.
I believe it is immoral to have sex with
animals, and have no desire to do so.
I believe it is immoral to consume common
domesticated pets (note: this includes goldfish!), and have no desire to do so.
If
you agree with, then please contact JesusPets to join our international
community of JesusPets Partners!
As Cowen
notes, JesusPets promises an important service that Eternal Earth Bound
does not: namely, not to consume or have sex with your pets after you’re gone (surely
such comfort is worth a premium).
Apparently other commercial enterprises are built around preparing
for the rapture, for example by notifying
your loved ones about what has happened to you, and sending
them messages after the rapture.Law & Order fans will recall this
episode on the same theme.
Sort of reminds me of our Reincarnation
Bank post over the summer, which promised to help you plan for (all of)
your futures, by offering safe keeping for any asset you wish to deposit until
you return for it in a later life
You don't see this every day: two feuding families rioted in bustling downtown Marion, Aalabama (pop. 29,465) today. I'm surprised the National Guard wasn't called in; everyone else was! The details from the Birmingham News:
Officers from eight police departments and Alabama state troopers set up a perimeter around the Marion City Hall around 11 a.m. today after a feud between two families reportedly spilled into a riot this morning involving about 100 people.
Perry County Commissioner Albert Turner Jr. told The Birmingham News that the trouble started about 10:30 p.m. Sunday, when members of one family came into the city and began fighting with members of another family. Police were called to the scene, no arrests were made and things settled down, Turner said. State Trooper John Reese said children of the 2 feuding families began arguing at the high school this morning and shotguns were found in their cars. The students were brought to City Hall and then their families showed up and the disturbance began.
"There were over 100 people and bystanders when the rest of the students' families started another fight outside City Hall, and it ended up inside City hall," Reese said. "The families got into it at the police station and took it from there," Turner said.
Randall Bezanson and Andrew Finkelman have posted a most creative work, "Trespassory Art," on ssrn. In short they argue for an expansion of the rights of artists to trespass on public and private property and perform on that property--an expansion, in essence, of the right to leaflet on private property in limited circumstances (like malls) or to conduct union organizing activity on an employer's private property. (Some of the trespassory art that they talk about involves leaving marks on the property where the trespass takes place--like defacing billboards. I take it that's not protected under their analysis.)
Creative stuff. It's worth a read for property professors and for people interested in remedies, too. I think when you finish the article you'll say, "that's something I haven't heard--or even thought about--before."
Bezanson and Finkelman are operating with at least distantly parallel issues to the right--recognized by statute in some states and common law in some others--to visit graves on private property.
I was, for awhile, trying to collect strange (ie, largely indefensible) copyright claims. I didn't get a lot of feedback on this, so the project died. You can, of course, always visit Chilling Effects to find these kinds of cases, but there are also reasonable (even if objectionable) claims there, as well. Sometimes, however, when one of these comes to my attention, I have to bring it up. This is one of those times.
A dispute has been simmering for the past week or so over Chris Schoenfeld's creation of an iPhone app to show the train schedules of the NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Schoenfeld also runs the website "StationStops", which focuses on transportation issues north of NYC (and is often critical of the MTA).
According to reports (there are nowmany, including video), the MTA started with a phone call threatening to "take down" Schoenfeld's site, but then backed off and insisted by letter only that he remove his iPhone app, which they claim was using their copyrighted schedules without a license. Schoenfeld, for his part, says he's willing to license their schedules, but there are two sticking points: 1) the MTA wants royalties for his past use, and a $5,000 up front fee. 2) Schoenfeld wants database access for schedule updates (which he current does not have, which means he manually recreates the schedules himself). The MTA, according to Schoenfeld, is unwilling to negotiate.
I held off blogging about this for awhile because I was sure I was missing something. The MTA's claim sounds in copyright, but I cannot find any way to make myself believe that the MTA has any colorable copyright claim here. In the U.S., "facts" are not protectable under copyright. You might arrange facts in a particular way and gain protection for your arrangement of them, but you cannot copyright facts as such (this is based on the famous, or perhaps infamous, doctrine that grew from the U.S. Supreme Court case of Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., which involved people's names, addresses and phone numbers in a telephone book). As with people's names and phone numbers, the time a train is scheduled to leave and depart a particular station is a fact. According to the latest reports, Schoenfeld is in negotiations with the MTA over the situation, and the EFF has also been in touch with him.
I hope that all the MTA is now negotiating for is access to their database, and that they're no longer continuing to assert their "copyright" claims.
We had our faculty retreat last week, which, strangely, got me thinking about drilling holes in my head. So I decided to do some internet digging on the phenomenon.
Via Wired Science,
Archeologists have found some amazing things in peat bogs.Like more than 270 kegs of “bog
butter.”And lots of bodies (see photo, via Archeology, below), preserved by Sphagnum mosses, which come with preservatives built
into their cell walls.Archaeologists
believe the bogs were sites for ritual sacrifices, because many of the bodies
appear to have been tortured or “overkilled.”
But murder wasn’t all that happened out on the bogs.
Multiple trepanated skulls – that is, skulls with holes drilled in them -- have
been found. (see photo, via Wired Science, below)Based on the use of the procedure in
medieval times, one hypothesis is that the “operation may have been performed
to remove a blood clot or a less-tangible thing like a spirit” from an
individual.
Today,
according to Wikipedia, “trepanation is a treatment used for epidural and
subdural hematomas, and for surgical access for certain other neurosurgical
procedures, such as intracranial pressure monitoring. Modern surgeons generally
use the term craniotomy for this procedure.”
Even now, there’s still a small number of people who think
drilling holes in their skulls is therapeutic. See, for example, the website of ITAG (the International Trepanation Advocacy Group) here.
Although considered today to be pseudoscience, the practice
of trepanation for other purported medical benefits continues. The most
prominent explanation for these benefits is offered by Dutchman Bart Huges
(alternatively spelled Bart Hughes). He is sometimes called Dr. Bart Hughes
although he did not complete his medical degree. Hughes claims that trepanation
increases "brain blood volume" and thereby enhances cerebral
metabolism in a manner similar to cerebral vasodilators such as ginkgo biloba.
No published results have supported these claims.
Other modern practitioners of trepanation claim that it holds
other medical benefits, such as a treatment for depression or other
psychological ailments. In 2000, two men from Cedar City, Utah were prosecuted
for practicing medicine without a license after they performed a trepanation on
an English woman to treat her chronic fatigue syndrome and depression.
However, individuals may practice non-emergency trepanation
for psychic purposes. A prominent proponent of the modern view is Peter
Halvorson, who drilled a hole in the front of his own skull to increase
"brain blood volume".
Here’s a trailer for the documentary, A Hole In the Head, which (although completely disgusting) demonstrates
the procedure and the rationales of trepanation's practitioners in some detail.
Also, according to Paul McCartney, John Lennon wanted Paul
to go with him for trepanations, but Paul wasn’t interested.See video footage here.
As to “retreat,” it has a few meanings.(1) An act or process of withdrawing
especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable; (2) a period of
group withdrawal for prayer, meditation, study, or instruction under a director;
(3) a place you go (preferably out of town) with golf clubs and/or tennis racquets;
or, alternatively, yoga mats and spa treatments.The first two definitions are from Merriam-Webster.I made up the third.
But can’t we all agree that if it’s just your colleagues
sitting around a classroom talking about curriculum and staffing issues, then
it’s a faculty meeting – albeit an interminably long and boring one – and not a
“retreat?” Of course, we have to have these and all sorts of other meetings if we are to get anything done, and I doubt that the "retreat" is any more pleasant for the dean than for the rest of us (perhaps less so). But now that I know a hole in the head is therapeutic, I may have to reorder my "things I don't want to do this week" hierarchy.
In this iTunes podcast, Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational fame) interviews Duke law prof Barak Richman about Richman’s current research on insurance coverage of outpatient mental health services.
John Yoo and Academic Freedom: Berkeley law dean Chris Edley at Balkinization, and Room for Debate, featuring Brian Leiter, University of Chicago Law School; Kathleen Clark, Washington University School of Law; Cary Nelson, American Association of University Professors; Carlos Villareal, National Lawyers Guild; and Brad Wendel, Cornell University Law School.(HT:Brian Leiter)
Felix Salmon sets off a debate on the economics of Tattoos:
Felix Salmon: “Businesses with tattooed employees are signalling to me that they have better service, and as a result I’m more likely to try them out.”
Economist.com: "The persistence of social conventions in hiring suggests
that most people don't tend to see things the way Mr Salmon does, but rather
take outward signs at face value. Most jobseekers do dress up for interviews.
Most young people seeking professional work do not get large, visible tattoos.”
Henry, at Crooked Timber: On Diego Gambetta’s, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, which “argues that criminals often cover themselves with tattoos precisely because they ruin the criminals’ prospects to go straight; they allow the criminals to signal ‘that defection would be not so much unprofitable as impossible.’”
The New York Times on drugs and older athletes (Not “older” like a 16-year old gymnast.Older, as in the 400-meter, 90-95 year old Masters group).Other recent Lounge posts on cheating, doping, and technology issues in sports are here, here, and here.
Depression-era headlines from the Joliet, Illinois paper, prematurely (really prematurely) predicting economic recovery.Examples include:
June 20, 1930: Business Ill But Recovery Is Under Way
October 26, 1930: Recovery From Depression Is Seen for U.S.
March 2, 1931: Business On Mend, Hoover Survey Shows
We will accept submissions from our readers — law professors, lawyers, law students, and academics in other fields are welcome to submit reviews.The reviews we envision would be approximately the length of a New York Times book review — somewhere between 500 to 2000 words.
Also at Co Op, Michael Kang revisits Moneyball, here and here.
And Patrick O'Donnell at Ratio Juris on the meaning(s) of ad hominem.
Where: John
Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) (59th Street and 10th
Avenue—near Lincoln Center in Manhattan)
Conference Organizer and Contact Person: Andrew Majeske, [email protected]
This conference aims to bring scholars of literature and law
into an interdisciplinary setting to share the fruits of their research and
scholarship.
The conference’s keynote speaker is John Matteson, winner of
the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his book Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.
John Matteson is a professor in the English Department at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, and obtained his JD from Harvard University.
The journal Law and
Literature is in the process of publishing a special symposium issue
containing full versions of select papers presented at the inaugural Literature
and Law Conference, and we are in negotiations with the journal to do the same
for this second biennial conference.
.
We invite papers dealing with all aspect of literature and
law, including papers which might address literature dealing with some of the
following:
-Comparative Justice
-The rule of law
-Rhetoric and law
-Judicial discretion and its abuse
-Blind justice
-Common versus Civil law
-(Post)Colonial Justice
-Law and Deception
-(Mis)Interpretation and Competing Interpretations of Law
-Non Western Justice and Injustice
-Comic Justice and Injustice
Please submit abstracts (250 words or less) to Andrew
Majeske, [email protected],
by Friday, January 15, 2010.
A colleague of mine today raised an interesting question to which I don't know the answer. He wondered if anyone was writing on the parallels between cyber-terrorism and the laws of war. He was thinking specifically about situations where a remote cyber-attack effectively brings down the infrastructure in a target country (eg hospitals, schools etc). Does anyone know of any work that brings together the fields of, say, International Humanitarian Law on the one hand, and Cybercrime on the other?
Now the Pew Center on the States takes the lemons (i.e., this horrible social phenomenon) and suggests making lemonade. In Maximum Impact:Targeting Supervision on Higher-Risk People,Places and Times, the authors argue that states can take advantage of the fact that crime is concentrated in small groups of people, small numbers of communities, and small units of time. This, from the executive summary:
One out of every 45 adults in the United States is under some form of criminal justice supervision in the community. These offenders commit a disproportionate share of the nation’s street crime: recent national statistics indicate that more than half of jail inmates were on probation, parole or pretrial release at the time of their arrest. Among these high-rate lawbreakers, a majority of the serious crimes are committed by a small fraction of people, in a small number of crime-ridden neighborhoods, during the first few months of probation or parole.
This concentration of crime—by person, place, and time—offers extraordinary opportunities for policy makers to improve public safety and save millions in corrections budgets. At a time when states are facing historic budget deficits, state leaders can prevent a large share of the nation’s criminal activity and cut corrections costs by helping probation and parole agencies focus their efforts on higherrisk offenders, in higher-risk neighborhoods, at higher-risk times through a strategy of targeted supervision.
I have mixed feelings about this. Although the language here is very nuanced - claiming only that these offenders commit commit a disproportionate share of street crime - it has potential to buttress the notion that the incarcerated population closely resembles the population of Americans who actually commit crimes. That is a far more questionable claim, particularly with respect to drug offenses. The police arrest a very particular sub-community of drug offenders.
On the other hand, this represents a progressive approach to post-conviction surveillance dedicated to prevention...rather than the revolving door of probation and parole revocation. (The report notes that in some states, 67% of prison admissions are for these revocations rather than new crimes.) As always, progressive criminal justice reform goes down easiest when coated in the language of "budget savings." But hey - we commodify everything in America. Why not social change as well?
Amtrak agreed to a confidential settlement with two PA teens who suffered massive burns in 2002 after they climbed aboard a parked railcar and stepped too close to a live wire. Part of the settlement calls for the trial judge to vacate prior rulings in the case, and have them erased from Lexis and Westlaw.
The August 10 order to vacate, issued by US District Judge Lawrence Stengel, stated that "by separate written communication . . . the Court shall direct LexisNexis and Westlaw to remove the Decisions and Orders listed below from their respective legal research services/databases."
How could such an order be enforced against an entity that wasn't party to the suit, not to mention the First Amendment defenses that would save them in a contempt proceeding?
A Westlaw rep told The Legal Intelligencer that the company automatically clears vacated opinions from the database - but that can't be right since I've got a pile of vacated Westlaw cases sitting on my desk. Nevertheless, the Klein docs have been removed, so it appears they took the easy road in deciding to comply with the judge's . . . order, request, direction . . . or whatever you call it.
As of yesterday, the opinions were still widely available on other sites. Volokh links to some of them at this post, saying they should be preserved for future litigators and scholars. I'm not so altruistic. I just think the order, if anything more than a non-binding suggestion, is an absurd breach of the First Amendment. So I'll link to them below, via the hard-drive PDFs I created yesterday, at the off chance they start disappearing from the web.
Conversations About Richard Posner And the People He Fights With
Not being very tech savvy, this was the best I could do in terms of remaking our banner and motto to reflect current events here at the Faculty Lounge.It seems that we’ve been covering a lot of Richard Posner scrapes lately.First there was the back and forth with Thaler (here and here).Then there was the David Levi tiff (here).
Posner, however, does “not think her analysis is responsible,” and is “concerned with the fact that academic economists, when they become either public officials or public intellectuals (like Paul Krugman), leave behind their academic scruples.”Posner picks through Romer’s arguments in some detail, so you should read his post (and her report, linked above) in its entirety to fully understand the substance of the dispute.Posner concludes by questioning the ethical responsibility of economists who write for the media or join the government:
This raises the question of the ethical responsibility of academic economists, such as Romer (and Krugman, and Lawrence Summers, and many others), who write for the media or join the government, either to adhere to academic standards in their nonacademic work or to make clear to the public that they are on holiday from those standards and that what they say in their public-intellectual or governmental careers should not be thought identical to their academic views.
Mark Thoma (here) and Brad DeLong (here) are not pleased, and quickly enter the fray in defense of Romer. In Unidentified Pretend Economist, Thoma asserts that Posner is wrong on many points:
Yet, nowhere does he say “I don’t know what I am talking about because I am a judge, not a macroeconomist.” Instead, in his role as a public intellectual, he acts like he is an expert in the field. Ethics indeed.
DeLong launches a more extended critique.In Richard A. Posner's Ethical Lapses, he argues that Posner writes dishonestly about the stimulus package, and that Posner’s piece contained at least seven major ethical lapses. According to DeLong:
In my view, anyone holding themself out as a public intellectual has one duty: to be smart. Being smart involves (a) checking your arithmetic, (b) building up your intellectual tools, (c) using Google, (d) reading works until you understand them, and (e) not writing things where you have absolutely no clue about what you are talking about.
Does Richard Posner think that he is behaving ethically here? In my view, he has failed to satisfactporily [sic] perform any item of that checklist.
Yesterday, Posner responded to DeLong, again on the Atlantic blog, in Christina Romer Defended by an Angry Academic Colleague, dismissing the bulk of DeLong’s claims and arguing that the piece reinforced his distrust of macroeconomists' analysis of the economic crisis.That’s all for now, but you know where to get the blow-by-blow if (when?) Judge Posner starts arguing with someone else.
The Scots have caused what is starting to amount to an international storm by releasing Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. According to the initial BBC Web report:
The Lockerbie bomber has left Scotland on board a plane bound for Libya after being freed from prison on compassionate grounds.
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, 57, was jailed in 2001 for the atrocity which claimed 270 lives in 1988.
The decision to release Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, was made by the Scottish Government.
There is more coverage, including a report that Megrahi still maintains his innocence, and another more recent BBC story raising questions about the release. Reactions have generally not been supportive (including those of the white house and the US Attorney General) of the Scottish Executive's decision. That said, the decision reflects a fundamental distinction between European and American attitudes on punishment and incarceration, including the death penalty. As a death penalty opponent, I often find myself more in line with European sentiment on criminal punishment.
That said, I don't personally support the decision to release Megrahi. While I can understand that questions of compassion might dictate the release of a killer or other criminal prior to a full term of incarceration being served, and I prefer the European approach to the U.S. "punish, punish, punish and punish some more" mentality, I don't think that dying of a natural disease (or old age) in prison is in and of itself an end that society needs to go to great lengths to avoid. I have not studied nor thought deeply of these issues before now, but on first reflection, I think the questions that need to be asked in such a situation are:
whether there are reasonable arguments that compassion serves to
mitigate against the convicted person serving the entirety of their
sentence; if so, then
whether the person convicted has served such an amount of time, considering the seriousness of their crime and its effects on victims and
society (including the victim's families and others who knew them), and given the totality of the circumstances, that a reasonable argument can be made that the crime has been "paid for" in some sense; if so, then
whether there is any reasonable possibility that the convicted person may engage in further crimes once released.
Here, I don't think that the case can come anywhere close to meeting the second part of the test. I cannot personally think of anyone I know who would think that an eight year sentence is sufficient to even begin paying for the damage caused by the 270 lives intentionally killed by Megrahi (and others). So, it would not satisfy step two, even if it satisfies step one. The facts aren't all out yet, but the extent to which the Scottish Executive considered the issues raised in number two isn't at all clear from what I have read.
I did have a friend, Lynne Hartunian, who died on Pan Am 103 (a classmate at the State University of New York College at Oswego), so perhaps I am not sufficiently object to make any kind of objective case here. But trying to look past my own emotions, and those of my friends, I'm still not sure I fully understand what the Scots were thinking.
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