Search the Site

Posts Tagged ‘law’

How Drunk Is Too Drunk to Drive?

Our podcast “The Suicide Paradox” featured sociologist David Phillips, who spoke about his research on copycat suicides (a phenomenon he calls “the Werther Effect”). More recently, Philips has been studying drunk driving. Particularly, he’s been looking at drivers who are merely “buzzed” — with 0.01 percent blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) — and has found that the severity of life-threatening motor vehicle accidents increases significantly at BACs far lower than the current U.S. limit of 0.08 percent. In an email, Philips describes his latest research on buzzed drivers:

My current research, just published in Injury Prevention, shows that even minimally buzzed drivers (with BAC=0.01%) are 46% more likely to be blamed for an accident than are the sober drivers they collide with. This indicates that there is no safe level of alcohol for drivers: any amount of alcohol markedly increases the risk to drivers and their passengers. We reached this conclusion after examining an official, U.S. dataset of more than 570,000 car crashes. The findings have implications for drivers, passengers, police, judges, lawyers, insurance companies, advocacy organizations (like MADD) and regulatory agencies.



An Economic Analysis of "Stop and Frisk"

A new working paper (gated) from Decio Coviello and Nicola Persico:

We analyze data on NYPD’s “stop and frisk program” in an effort to identify racial bias on the part of the police officers making the stops.    We find that the officers are not biased against African Americans relative to whites, because the latter are being stopped despite being a “less productive stop” for a police officer.

Excerpts:

New York City’s stop-and-frisk program disproportionally impacts minorities. The New York Civil Liberties Union makes this point forcefully by documenting that, in 2011, 52.9 percent of stops were of blacks, 33.7 percent were of Latinos, while whites accounted for only 9.3 percent of the stops. This disparate impact is unfortunate, but should not be surprising if we believe that crime and therefore policing are disproportionally concentrated in minority-rich neighborhoods.

However, mere disparate impact is not the same as impermissible behavior. Discrimination law in the United States generally does not prohibit disparate impact, as long as it does not reflect an intent to discriminate. Therefore, if one is interested in impermissible behavior, it is helpful to have an empirical strategy which goes beyond merely documenting disparate impact, and can detect racial animus on the part of the police.



How Political Are Judges?

Cass Sunstein, writing on Bloomberg View, reviews the research on judicial voting patterns to determine whether judges are really as “political” as people seem to think.  The good news: federal judges aren’t nearly as bad as politicians.  “Judges are far from mere politicians; we don’t see anything like the kind of polarization found in Congress,” writes Sunstein. “At the same time, judicial predispositions matter, and they help explain why judges are divided on some of the great issues of the day.”  

The research also indicates that even judges are subject to a phenomenon called “group polarization.”  “[J]udicial voting becomes a lot more ideological when judges sit on panels with two others appointed by presidents of the same political party,” Sunstein explains. “For example, Republican appointees side with plaintiffs complaining of disability discrimination about 29 percent of the time — but that number drops to 17 percent when they are sitting with two fellow Republican appointees.”

As for the Supreme Court, Sunstein highlights research from a new book on the political leanings of Supreme Court justices since 1937:

Strikingly, they find that of the six most conservative justices in their entire sample, no fewer than three are currently on the court (Clarence ThomasAntonin Scalia and Samuel Alito). A fourth makes the top 10 (John Roberts). By contrast, none of the current justices ranks among the most liberal six, and only one makes the liberal top 10 (Ruth Bader Ginsburg).



What Do the Election Results Mean for I.P.?

In the wake of President Obama‘s solid re-election victory last night, we are left wondering (geeks that we are) about what (if anything) an Obama second term suggests about the future of IP law.  We’ll talk mostly about copyright policy here: Any action on IP policy in the next couple of Congresses would probably focus on copyright, not least because we’ve just been through a substantial reform of the patent law and no one has any appetite to revisit that right away.

Even focusing only on copyright, the picture is far from clear.  Millions of people joined in a wave of online activism back in January to defeat the copyright expansions offered in the SOPA and PIPA bills.  But the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA is new and no one’s sure whether it’s a one-off or the beginning of a broader movement to slow, stop, or even reverse copyright’s relentless expansion. We’d note also that two of the entertainment industry’s favorite people in the House, Reps. Howard Berman and Mary Bono Mack, were both defeated last night. We doubt the losses have much to do with the pair’s outspoken copyright maximalism, but losing Berman and Bono is a further blow to a pro-copyright side that is still getting its collective head around the SOPA/PIPA debacle.



Standing Your Ground

A new NBER paper examines the effect of Stand Your Ground self-defense laws, which “eliminate the longstanding legal requirement that a person threatened outside of his or her own home retreat rather than use force.”  Chandler B. McClellan and Erdal Tekin exploit cross-state variations in implementation dates to determine the effect of these laws on homicides.  Their findings are grim: 

Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males.  According to our estimates, between 4.4 and 7.4 additional white males are killed each month as a result of these laws.  We find no evidence to suggest that these laws increase homicides among blacks.  Our results are robust to a number of specifications and unlikely to be driven entirely by the killings of assailants.



How California’s GMO Labeling Law Could Limit Your Food Choices and Hurt the Poor

The American Medical Association resolved this week that “there is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods.”

The association has long-held that nothing about the process of recombinant DNA makes genetically engineered (GE) crop plants inherently more dangerous to the environment or to human health than the traditional crop plants that have been deliberately but slowly bred for human purposes for millennia. It is a view shared by the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., the European Commission, and countless other national science academies and non-governmental organizations.



Two Ways to Make Them Pay

A reader, who is also a lawyer, writes in with an interesting example of incentives in the courtroom. He tells us about a particular judge in New Hampshire, who developed a strategic approach to collecting fines: I thought you might be interested in this little experiment in economics. People cannot be sent to jail, under the Constitution, for being poor — . . .



Why Online Poker Should Be Legal (Ep. 93)

In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, Steve Levitt visits with Marketplace‘s Kai Ryssdal to discuss his poker research and his personal poker history. The episode is called “Why Online Poker Should Be Legal.” You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.

In case you haven’t been following the long-running legal story, here’s the gist. Online poker was growing fast in the U.S. until Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which pretty much shut things down. The ruling was based in large part on the government’s reasoning that poker is predominantly a game of chance as opposed to a game of skill.  But is this classification correct?



Locally Produced Condoms?

The Los Angeles City Council may require condoms in porn movies produced in the city limits. How will this affect the market?  Whether companies stay in L.A. or leave, costs will rise (condom costs if they stay, the costs of relocation, loss of agglomeration economies, if they move outside the city limits).  If costs do rise, will that matter to producers? I imagine product demand is fairly inelastic, and they can easily pass the cost increase onto consumers. But even if costs were unaffected, consumer demand might shift far leftward if producers remained in L.A., since customers may not wish to view protected sex. Industry members lobbied strongly against the bill — perhaps because they feared the direct drop in demand rather than the cost increase.



Customer Dis-service

I recently had one of the strangest customer service episodes I’ve ever experienced. It took place at Café Bon Appetit in downtown Chicago. A group of twenty of us were eating lunch there. It is one of those places that has many food stations to choose from, then you pay for your food and find a table. There is no table service. It’s a huge restaurant. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the restaurant can seat 300 people. That is one of the reasons we go there in a big group — there are always plenty of seats.

One of the diners, who is on some sort of vegan, non-gluten health kick, had brought her own lunch. The rest of us had bought our lunch there. We found a table in the nearly completely empty back seating area. About halfway through lunch, the restaurant manager appeared. I assumed it was to thank us for coming and to ask how the food was. It turned out his mission was quite different.



Why Gun Traffickers Should Live in Arizona

A new study by Brian Knight, an economist at Brown, explores the flow of the illegal firearm market in America and compares the source of guns used in crimes to gun laws in and around that state.
How big is the market for illegal firearms? Pretty big. Knight writes: “ATF investigations into tracking between July 1996 and December 1998 identify over 84,000 firearms that were diverted into this secondary market (ATF, 2000).” Meanwhile, each state in America legislates its own gun laws, resulting in cross-state externalities. For example, Knight cites anecdotal evidence showing that a gun purchased legally in Virginia for $150 – $200 typically resells in New York City for $500 – $600. This is the sort of thing that keeps Michael Bloomberg up at night.
Here’s the abstract:



Will First-to-File Hurt Small Inventors?

The U.S. just passed the first major patent reform in nearly sixty years – which includes as a central provision a change to the patent priority rule. Instead of awarding a patent to the first person to invent, we will join other nations in awarding patents to the first person to file an invention.
David Abrams and Polk Wagner have a great paper looking at whether the proposed change in our patent system from a “first to invent” regime to a “first to file” regime is likely to disadvantage individual inventors. The concern is that corporate inventors will have an easier time than the individual in gearing up to draft and file a patent application.
The paper ingeniously looks to see what happened when Canada introduced a similar reform in 1989. The paper is also a great way to teach yourself about the difference-in-difference approach to estimation. The paper first estimates the pre-reform difference between the U.S. and Canada in the proportion of patents going to individual inventors. It then looks to see whether this difference changed – that is, whether there was a difference in the difference – after the Canadian first-to-file reform went into effect.



How Advancements in Neuroscience Will Influence the Law

Oh, my neck! Oh, my back!
Every day, legal decisions are made based on the pain, suffering, and anxiety people say they’re feeling, even though we have no objective way to measure them. So what if we could see inside people’s minds — not just to know what they’re feeling now, but what they’ve felt in the past too?
Advancements in neuroscience are already improving our ability to do so. A new article published in the Emory Law Journal (full version here) entitled “The Experiential Future of the Law,” by Brooklyn Law School professor Adam Kolber, looks at how these advancements will continue over the next 30 years (to the point of near mind-reading), and how they’ll inevitably lead to changes in the law.



What Will San Francisco Ban Next? How About Circumcisions

Last November, when San Francisco effectively banned McDonald’s Happy Meals, we wondered what it would try to ban next. The answer? Circumcisions. From the AP:

A group seeking to ban the circumcision of male children in San Francisco has succeeded in getting their controversial measure on the November ballot, meaning voters will be asked to weigh in on what until now has been a private family matter.
City elections officials confirmed Wednesday that the initiative had received enough signatures to appear on the ballot, getting more than 7,700 valid signatures from city residents. Initiatives must receive at least 7,168 signatures to qualify.
If the measure passes, circumcision would be prohibited among males under the age of 18. The practice would become a misdemeanor offense punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or up to one year in jail. There would be no religious exemptions.



Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing

A new study of capital sentences handed down in first degree murder cases finds evidence of racial bias against minority defendants who killed white victims. The study (abstract here; pdf here) was conducted by Harvard economist Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara of Universita’ Bocconi. It finds that for sentences handed down to minority defendants convicted of killing white victims were as much as 9 percent more likely to be reversed than in cases involving a minority defendant killing a minority victim. The study examined the race of the defendant and of the victim(s) for all capital appeals that be came final in the U.S. between 1973 and 1995.



Iatrogenic Legal Assistance?

Harvard Professors Jim Greiner and Cassandra Pattanayak have posted a remarkable randomized experiment (“What Difference Representation?”) with evidence showing that offers for free legal representation from the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (HLAB) ended up hurting unemployment claimants.



Michigan's Big Industry

My Michigan-dwelling grandson will be 15 soon and will start learning to drive. He can’t get a full license until he’s 17, though, as the state wants to limit times and amounts of teen driving, presumably for safety reasons. That’s sensible – teen drivers are more likely to get into accidents. Despite this, the state prevents insurance companies from requiring people to purchase additional coverage for the teenager, even though between ages 16 and 17 the boy will be driving on his own.



Behavioral Economics, the Law, and the Regulators

Truth on the Market is hosting an online forum on behavioral law and economics, the “Free to Choose?” symposium. So far, people like David Levine, Ronald Mann and Christopher Sprigman have taken their turns.



What Will San Francisco Ban Next?

I keep thinking the headlines are from The Onion but they are not. First we read that San Francisco has effectively banned the Happy Meal. Then we learn of a new law that bans people from sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. (known, naturally, as the “sit/lie law”). Some months ago, the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare proposed banning the sale of any pets other than fish, but that measure has apparently been tabled.



Quotes Uncovered: Notable Supreme Court Quotes

Turning from celebrity culture to a weightier arena, I am again seeking suggestions of notable quotations from United States Supreme Court decisions of recent years. Are there any worthy successors to the eloquent justices of the past, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Robert H. Jackson?



Look Who Just Decriminalized Prostitution

A Superior Court justice gutted the federal prostitution law in Ontario on Tuesday. This means that prostitution might become decriminalized throughout Canada, although it might not.



The Verdict on Cash for Clunkers: a Clunker

From a new working paper by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: “We examine the ability of the government to increase consumption by evaluating the impact of the 2009 “Cash for Clunkers” program on short and medium run auto purchases.”



Of Prom Dresses and Textbooks

A few years ago, a contracts student of mine left me almost speechless when he admitted in class that he had purchased a tie from J. Press with the intent of returning it after he wore it to deliver a mock oral argument to me (as a mock Connecticut Supreme Court Justice).



The Meaning of "My"

One of my summertime reading pleasures has been reading C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters for the first time. As a new generation of property student begins the school year, I thought it would be useful to pass on this commentary on the most property-laden adjective, the possessive “my.”



Is Your University Complying With the New Textbook Law?

University students are returning to campuses throughout the country. It is a migration that raises my spirits – seeing the energetic, eager faces tackling another course in contracts or intellectual property. But this year something is different. For the first time, a federal law has taken effect which requires “institution of higher education receiving Federal financial assistance” to provide students with information on textbook pricing.



Ticketfree Responds

I received the following email from Kyle Tower, one of the lead members of the Ticketfree team, responding to my earlier post on speeding insurance.



Never Pay a Speeding Ticket Again?

A couple weeks ago, Ian Ayres became briefly fascinated and somewhat appalled by the appearance of a new Internet business that offered a sort of insurance against speeding tickets. In return for an annual fee of $169, ticketfree.org promised to reimburse you for the costs of up to $500 in moving violations. Then, the site suddenly disappeared. Why?



How Would You Simplify the Financial-Reform Bill? A Freakonomics Quorum

Last month, roughly two years into a global financial maelstrom, the U.S. Congress passed a financial-reform bill. It was more than 2,300 pages long, addressing everything from derivatives to consumer financial products to oversized banks. We asked a few clever people a simple question.