Reason’s Damon Root writes about John McWhorter’s list of books on race that should receive more attention. He highlights a quote about Ethan Brown’s Snitch:

If there were no War on Drugs, I sincerely believe that within a single generation, there would be no perceptible “crisis in black America,” and this book shows much of why that’s true. The War on Drugs turns whole neighborhoods against the cops—with no discernible benefit after more than 30 years. Brown’s book is very The Wire–except the people he writes about are real.

and then recalls a quote from Wire co-creator David Simon:

For 35 years, you’ve…marginalized a certain percentage of your population, most of them minority, and placed them in a situation where the only viable economic engine in their hypersegregated neighborhoods is the drug trade. Then you’ve alienated them further by fighting this draconian war in their neighborhoods, and not being able to distinguish between friend or foe and between that which is truly dangerous or that which is just illegal.

I like this quote from David Simon better:

The Wire will have an effect on the way a certain number of thoughtful people look at the drug war. It will not have the slightest effect on the way the nation as a whole does business.

Some people like to say that the way you change policy isn’t to study policy analysis, but to make a movie instead.

But we often observe only one side of the experimental condition: those cases where a specific media message changed policy. What about all those movies on the War on Drugs? Not a lot of policy change so far.

The Park National shutdown occurred after several Illinois congressmen, including Reps. Bobby Rush and Danny Davis and Sen. Roland Burris, called the FDIC asking it to delay closing the bank for at least a week, said Marilyn Katz, a bank spokeswoman.

and

Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.) told [FDIC Chairwoman] Ms. Bair he wasn’t “convinced that the FDIC isn’t contributing to the awful problems that we’re having” in his state, where 20 banks have failed in 2009. The banks “dot every ‘i’ and they cross every ‘t’ and then the knock comes on the door on Friday afternoon,” he told her.

HT CalculatedRisk.

During his immersion in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske attended a focus group of 7-year-old girls and was mystified by their talk about “farm parties.” Then he realized they meant “pharm parties” – sampling pharmaceuticals from their parents’ medicine cabinets. What he learned – besides that young humans have less native sense than young dachshunds have – is that his job has wrinkles unanticipated when he became director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

HT George Will.

Seton Hall school of law is hosting “Religious Legal Theory: The State of the Field” November 12th – more details here.

Washington University professor Andrew Martin and his collaborators have recently released their US Supreme Court Database website. It updates, enhances, and streamlines Spaeth’s original data set. This project looks to be a significant development in the field and  a very useful and reliable resource for law and courts scholars interested in studying SCOTUS. The website can be found here, and Andrew’s formal announcement is available below the fold.

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce the release of the Supreme Court Database website
at:

 	http://supremecourtdatabase.org

Over the last 18 months, my collaborators and I have modernized and
enhanced the database in a number of ways with two objectives.  First, we
wanted to secure and protect the integrity of the database Harold Spaeth
has so diligently amassed over the last few decades.  Second, we wanted to
secularize the data to make the information accessible to all scholars,
students, and the public.  The technology on the site was designed to meet
both objectives.

The database currently contains data from 1953 to 2008.  It will be
updated each term going forward.  The site contains a streamlined
interface that allows anyone to go online and pull up cases with ease, and
perform simple analyses.  The site also contains downloadable formats for
analysis in a variety of statistical packages.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, we have begun the
process of coding all cases from the court's first decision in 1792 to
1952, and will be regularly posting updates of this back-dating project
over the next four years.

We hope you find the site useful and look forward to your feedback.

Best,
ADM

Here.

Professor David Nutt, the British government’s chief drug advisor, has been fired after claiming that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol.

Nutt at Bristol and Wiki.

Via Huffington Post.

In Paris, France … I imagine that having a JD would help too , but apparently is not required …

HEC PARIS

                   Faculty Positions in the Area of
                International, European and Company Law

     The Department of Legal Studies at HEC Paris, is opening
     two positions for junior scholars, full-time, tenure-track,
     starting in 2010.

     HEC Paris is ranked first Business School in Europe and in
     France (FT). Law teaching is one of its distinctive
     features; in addition to a large diversity of mandatory and
     elective law courses, HEC Paris offers to its students
     specializations in business law.

     JOB QUALIFICATIONS:

     The candidate must have a promising record in research and
     teaching in one or more of the following areas:

     - Private international law
     - Law and economics
     - European Union law
     - Company Law (national and comparative)
     - International Taxation

     Applicants are required to have (or be about to complete) a
     Ph.D. degree. While HEC Paris is a bilingual school
     (English/French), the ability to teach in French is not
     mandatory.

     APPLICATION PROCEDURE:

     Applicants must send their curriculum vitae to Elizabeth
     Hautefeuille by January 15th 2010 at the following address:

     CONTACT:       Elizabeth Hautefeuille
     Email:         MAILTO:hautefeuille@hec.fr

     Pre-selected candidates will be asked to send a writing
     sample and the names, telephone numbers and e-mail
     addresses of three references by February 1st, 2010.

     Short-listed candidates will be invited for an interview
     and a paper presentation in March/April 2010.

     For additional information about HEC Paris, please refer to
     our website at:

                    http:www.hec.fr
[hat tip SSRN]

The proposed Coburn amendment to eliminate the political science division of the National Science Foundation and funding for political science research has once again raised the question of whether academic research is relevant to real-world problems.

The controversy over electing judges provides interesting insight into this question, particularly when examining the reactions of the advocacy community to scientific studies of judicial elections published in the nation’s leading academic journals, law reviews, and commercial presses. While there certainly are valid criticisms of empirical studies of judicial selection, it simply is the case that empirical findings that contradict political strategies and goals will not be acknowledged and incorporated into the public dialogue no matter how relevant or compelling.

It has not mattered, for example, that empirical evidence has shown for decades that there are no measurable differences between judges chosen in partisan elections and judges chosen by other “less political” methods. Nor have many in the “reform”  community demonstrated concern with the fact that nonpartisan elections effectively disenfranchise large segments of the electorate, raise the costs of seeking office, and open supreme court races to idiosyncratic forces. Similarly, recent evidence showing that confidence in courts is not lower in states using partisan elections has not been incorporated into the public dialogue, or the fact that elections are perhaps the most powerful legitimacy-conferring institutions in the world.

The bottom line is that contradictory evidence is irrelevant to actors pursuing their own agendas, an irony in the case of judicial selection since many of the most aggressive advocates against judicial elections are judges and attorneys. The same evidence also may seem, without effort to understand it, incomprehensible.

In fact, many advocates in the judicial selection controversy engage in forms of fact-finding quite removed from the standards and practices of scientific journals in political science, including the use of anecdotes to claim general tendencies or to discredit them, public opinion polls with biased question wording and flawed sampling strategies, incorrect and selective interpretation of poll results, and reliance on the opinions of “experts” as concrete evidence of problems that cannot yet be seen but nonetheless purportedly are looming. These are attempts to seek the truth but often produce evidence that does not withstand more rigorous scientific scrutiny.

There is another kind of problem, however, quite apart from sincere though flawed attempts to seek the truth. Best explained by Princeton University Professor Emeritus Harry Frankfurt in his illuminating essay On Bullshit, there is a distinct form of expression – “bullshit” – the defining characteristic of which is offering statements to suit one’s own purpose without much regard for whether the statements actually are true or false.  Given the instrumental nature of political action (no matter how altruistically the goals of many advocacy organizations are stated) and the willingness to argue positions that may lack empirical support, academic work is ignored or dismissed, usually with flimsy arguments not befitting a badly educated high school debate team (more on this in my next post). As part of this, econometrics become easy to caricature among non-academics as being divorced from reality or as having some fatal flaw. Thus, “bullshit” is a powerful countervailing force to science.

In short, science and politics often are not compatible, and no amount of careful study, scientific rigor, or attempts to contribute constructively to the political process will change that. Even so, truth intrinsically is important, and the difficulties political scientists may encounter when engaging political actors does not render the enterprise any less worthwhile.

Melinda Gann Hall

Dear Voir Dire readers, please join me in welcoming professor Melinda Gann Hall to our blog. While she needs     no introduction, I’ll provide a little bio information for anyone who is doesn’t follow law and courts or state           politics work and is therefore unfamiliar with her scholarship. Melinda earned her Ph.D. at the University of    New  Orleans    in 1983 and is now Professor and Distinguished Faculty at Michigan State University, department  of  political  science.

Her publications, awards, and professional leadership positions are too numerous to list here, but you can find her vitae here. She (along with Chris Bonneau) has recently penned a book, In Defense of Judicial Elections and she is also a co-creator (with Paul Brace) of the well-known State Supreme Court Data Project, funded by NSF. We look forward to her posts and I am sure that you will enjoy her insights.

HT Graphjam.

The New York Times reports on the Hawaii healthcare system and how it compares against the rest of the nation. Since 1974 the state has required all employers to provide healthcare benefits to any employee working twenty hours a week or more. As the chart at the left indicates this situation has not led to an explosion in health care costs.

“But perhaps the most intriguing lesson from Hawaii has to do with costs. This is a state where regular milk sells for $8 a gallon, gasoline costs $3.60 a gallon and the median price of a home in 2008 was $624,000 — the second-highest in the nation. Despite this, Hawaii’s health insurance premiums are nearly tied with North Dakota for the lowest in the country, and Medicare costs per beneficiary are the nation’s lowest.

Hawaii residents live longer than people in the rest of the country, recent surveys have shown, and the state’s health care system may be one reason. In one example, Hawaii has the nation’s highest incidence of breast cancer but the lowest death rate from the disease.”

But the system is certainly not perfect:

“There are clear problems with Hawaii’s system. Hospitals on the outer islands are small and losing money. With unemployment rising, so, too, are the ranks of the uninsured — which is now 10.7 percent of nonelderly adults. Only Massachusetts has a lower share of uninsured adults, and the national share is 20.4 percent. And there is growing evidence that as the economy has slowed and premiums have risen, employers have hired more part-time workers who are ineligible for benefits.”

It might be interesting to hear what Hawaiian policy makers think of the proposals currently circulating in DC. Given the state’s success, it is rather surprising that other states haven’t done more experimenting with such a system.

The Law School Innovation Blog details a movement to establish a “nationalized” or “uniform” bar exam. Apparently, at least 10 states are on board with this idea and the switch should come next year. I am surprised that this hasn’t been bigger news in the media or the blogosphere, if in fact it is not a hoax. I’m not too surprised to read that the larger market states (e.g. California, New York, Florida, etc.) are not participating. If this does come to pass, then it should be a great benefit for law students in those states adopting the change as they will enjoy a greatly enhanced set of potential job opportunities. It’s nearly impossible to sell yourself as a new graduate to a firm in which you don’t have the bar exam under your belt – although perhaps not so much with mega firms. The usual concerns over the bar exam aside, this should do good things for at least certain segments of the legal economy.

The WSJ Blog has two interesting recent posts on the law associate scene – the first is on lockstep pay increases (and decreases)  versus merit pay for law firm associates and the second is on (ew!) networking (it’s actually a very helpful and informative post).

The Pug - well known for its business acumen

Details on The Monkey Cage Blog here.

Check out my post on the world’s “Giant Pool of Money” and the current financial crises on The Faculty Lounge.

John Jackson has some nice advice in this quarter’s The Political Methodologist:

I suggest to students heading for their first job to write on an index card four institutions where you would be happy to have a tenured position in six years. Select these on the basis of the type of department and university that best fits your personality and interests: large versus small, relative time and weight given to teaching, public versus private, heterogenous or more homogenous in the type of work and approaches, etc. For the first four years look at that card at the end of each year and honestly assess whether you have made progress towards that goal. As the tenure decision gets closer look at that card more frequently to keep in mind what was your goal, how you dened success, and whether you are succeeding. If the answer to the last part is yes, then you have succeeded regardless of the current tenure decision.

Markets usually work.

A 2001 paper worth reading from Vince Kaminski and John Martin:

And in what may well be a unique feature in corporate America, Enron’s top management today uses its human capital flows to guide its allocations of financial capital.

Gotta love hindsight. Kaminski was a main quant at Enron. Some say he tried, but ultimately failed, to avert Enron’s collapse.

A good ‘public service announcement’ from the folks at “Funny or Die” with a lot of TV faces you might recognize. Somehow it’s kind of funny to see ad executive Don Draper taking a poke at insurance executives – still works though – but doesn’t everything John Hamm seem just a little better? [hat tip Rorie Spill Solberg on FB]