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Law & Econ Prof Blog 

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Post Frequency: 0.2/day Last Entry: August 16, 2009 at 15:44:12 Recent Entries: 51
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About Law & Econ Prof Blog
Posted on August 16, 2009The Law Professor Blogs Network has ceased publication of this blog.
Markets and Morals
Posted on June 17, 2009I very highly recommend Al Roth's summary of Michael Sandel's BBC Reith Lectures on "Markets and Morality" -- available here. TSU
Caperton v. Massey
Posted on June 10, 2009Earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Clapton v. Massey. The decision was 5 - 4, with Justice Kennedy writing the majority opinion, and Chief Justice Roberts, a dissent. Here is the front matter from...
Whew!
Posted on June 06, 2009I apologize for the large gap in postings. This has been a particularly taxing semester. But the worst is behind me, and the best is ahead. Here are a few things to check out as I ease back into blogging...
Crime and Incarceration
Posted on March 24, 2009James Q. Wilson, whose work I admire immensely and who is one of the most careful scholars of crime and criminal justice policy, has a marvelous column today at AEI summarizing what we know and do not know about the...
North Carolina and Car Sharing
Posted on March 08, 2009I'm sitting outside the Weaver Street Market in Carboro, North Carolina (just outside Chapel Hill), on a delightful Spring morning. I've visiting my dear friend Mitu Gulati, who is off at a spinning class while I drink coffee and catch...
Summary of Recent Developments in Economic Theory
Posted on January 26, 2009This article, available at SSRN, by William Ferguson of the Department of Economics at Grinnell College, is a wonderful, brief introduction to recent developments in economic theory. I think that those in the legal academy who are not in regular...
Judicial Productivity
Posted on January 19, 2009Adam Liptak's column in The New York Times for tomorrow -- available here -- contends that there are credible studies showing that paying judges more, as urged annually by the Chief Justice of the United States in his report on...
New Dean of University of Illinois College of Law
Posted on January 10, 2009Bruce P. Smith, a noted legal historian and award-winning University of Illinois law professor, has been named Dean of the College of Law, pending approval by U. of I. trustees at their Jan. 15 meeting in Chicago. Dean Smith, who...
Keeping Track of References
Posted on December 17, 2008One of the great problems that modern scholars have is keeping track of all the references that might go into one's articles and books. EndNote is a wonderful help for that part of the scholar's task. Today's column in the...
Predicting Success
Posted on December 16, 2008When a university department hires an entry-level candidate to be an assistant professor, the members of the department frequently have widely different views of whether the new assistant professor will be a successful researcher, an engaging teacher, and a valued...
Social Disorder and Crime
Posted on December 06, 2008Here's a fascinating article from The Economist, describing experiments done by Dutch researchers on the relationship between social disorder and crime. This is an attempt to explore the "broken windows" hypothesis of Kelling and Wilson, who held that when there...
Science and the Law
Posted on November 25, 2008Today's New York Times has a wonderful column by Adam Liptak, "From One Footnote, a Debate Over the Tangles of Law, Science, and Money," available here. The article discusses footnote 17 in the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Exxon v....
Amusing Take on the Financial Crisis
Posted on September 27, 2008I have loved Andy Borowitz's short, amusing essays in The New Yorker in the "Shouts and Murmurs" section. His recent column. "Too Big to Fail," available here, is a wonderful take on the financial crisis. You'll enjoy it. TSU
Guinness Book of World Records
Posted on September 26, 2008The 2009 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records appeared recently. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had this marvelous review of the book by Dan Ackman. You will be amused and enlightened. TSU
Regional Personalities in the U.S.
Posted on September 24, 2008This article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal reports on research that suggests that there are distinct personality types in the different regions of the United States. I do not know the underlying methods or data that were used to reach...
A Manipulated Prediction Market?
Posted on September 24, 2008I am a fan of prediction markets -- unless, of course, they are being manipulated so as not to reflect the true aggregated beliefs of traders. So, this column at fivethirtyeight.com (an excellent source of statistical information about the election)....
More Financial News
Posted on September 21, 2008David Leonhardt of The New York Times is back from his several-month sabbatical and has an excellent article, "Bubblenomics," in today's New York Times Magazine on the financial crisis. TSU
Financial Crisis
Posted on September 20, 2008The causes of the financial crisis and the particular correctives of the federal government's bailout plan are both a bit hazy to us nonspecialists. Today's Freakonomics column, guest written by Douglas Diamond and Anil Kashyap and available here, is extremely...
CELS
Posted on September 17, 2008Last Friday and Saturday, four of my colleagues at the University of Illinois College of Law (David Hyman, Jay Kesan, Bob Lawless, and Jen Robbennolt) and I attended the Third Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies. The conference was held...
TV -- Good or Bad?
Posted on September 06, 2008There's an interesting article in this morning's Wall Street Journal summarizing recent empirical work by economists on the effects of children's TV-atching. See here. Ignore the breathless description of new statistical techniques and focus instead on the empirical work...
Expert Witnesses
Posted on August 11, 2008There's an excellent article by Adam Liptak in today's New York Times on how different legal systems qualify expert witnesses to testify. The U.S. in unique in delegating to the adversarial parties the choice of experts, with each side typically...
Smatterings
Posted on August 02, 2008Here are several things that I've been thinking about or reading lately: 1. Robert Ellickson, The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth. The book will be available from Princeton University Press on August 21, 2008. Here's the Amazon.com page. 2...
Michael Heller, The Gridlock Economy
Posted on July 15, 2008Michael Heller's articles on the anticommons and the boundaries of property interests are some of the most innovative contributions to the scholarship on property in the past 30 years. He has just published The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership...
Parking Spots
Posted on July 12, 2008Here's a magnificent example of how technology might make our lives better. San Francisco is, according to today's New York Times, installing a system of sensors on 6,000 of its 24,000 on-street public parking spots that will allow those with...
Crime 2007
Posted on July 08, 2008New York had 494 homicides last year, the lowest since reliable figures were first gathered in 1963. Foxnews.com reported on June 9 that the preliminary annual Uniform Crime Report from the FBI shows that violent and property crime declined 1.4...
Innovation in Law Firm Organization
Posted on July 03, 2008Bill Henderson and Mark Galanter (and some others) have been writing some excellent articles tracking changes in the organizational structure of law firms. The July 2 "Legal Beat" column in the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about the...
Endowment Effect
Posted on July 02, 2008There is an excellent summary article on the endowment effect -- aptly entitled "It's Mine, I Tell You" -- in this week's Economist magazine. The article is available here. The endowment effect holds that possession of a good, asset, or...
Pay-to-Stay
Posted on June 24, 2008The November, 2007, issue of First Impressions, the "on-line companion" to the Michigan Law Review, available here, has a symposium issue on "Pay-to-Stay Programs in Correctional Facilities." Here's a description from the law review's website: "Approximately fifteen California jails have...
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If a person defames me and threatens me to pay a bill that they made and it is posted to others besides myself, can I sue ?
The documentation of your actions in this case pretty much preclude any legal ac...
Is it libel to write blog posts and/or online reviews about a local business that defames one's reputation?
Libel is the form of defamation expressed in fixed-- usually written form. Sland...
How can I make my blog more popular?
You have to write and submit articles, with backlinks to your blogsite....

If a person defames me and threatens me to pay a bill that they made and it is posted to others besides myself, can I sue ?
The documentation of your actions in this case pretty much preclude any legal ac...
Is it libel to write blog posts and/or online reviews about a local business that defames one's reputation?
Libel is the form of defamation expressed in fixed-- usually written form. Sland...
How can I make my blog more popular?
You have to write and submit articles, with backlinks to your blogsite....








