Category: Law
The 8th Amendment Case Against Civil Asset Forfeiture
The Supreme Court has agreed to look at whether the 8th Amendment clause forbidding “excessive fines” applies against the states.
The case in question involves the controversial practice of civil asset forfeiture. Tyson Timbs was convicted and served time and paid fines for selling a small amount of drugs to an undercover officer. The state also launched a civil asset forfeiture case against his car:
…But the trial court ruled against the government. Because taking Tyson’s car would be “grossly disproportionate” to his offense—for which Tyson had already been punished—the trial court held that the forfeiture would violate the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. The Indiana Court of Appeals agreed. Tyson suffered from drug addiction, the court noted, but his only record of dealing was selling a small amount of drugs to undercover police. The court also noted the “financial burdens” that Tyson had already faced when he pleaded guilty. Taking his car on top of all that would violate the Eighth Amendment.
Then the Indiana Supreme Court stepped in. Breaking with at least 14 other state high courts, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment provides no protection at all against fines and forfeitures imposed by the states.
…“This case is about more than just a truck,” said Wesley Hottot, an attorney with the Institute for Justice. “The Excessive Fines Clause is a critical check on the government’s power to punish people and take their property. Without it, state and local law enforcement could confiscate everything a person owns based on a minor crime or—using civil forfeiture—no crime at all.”
The case has potentially very wide application, far beyond civil asset forfeiture, because municipal governments desperate for revenue are criminalizing and fining minor infractions (see also my posts on Ferguson, MO and here)
Hilda Brucker went down to the municipal court in October 2016 after receiving a phone call. She hadn’t received a formal summons or known of any wrongdoing; instead, she thought she needed to clear a ticket.
But when she arrived at the Doraville, Georgia, courthouse, Brucker said she was placed before a judge and prosecutor who accused her of violating city code — because of cracks in her driveway.
She was fined $100 and sentenced to six months criminal probation, even though this was the first time she was made aware her driveway was considered a problem.
…About 25 percent of Doraville’s operating budget is reliant on fees and fines, according to IJ, a nonprofit law firm. From August 2016 to August 2017, it raked in about $3.8 million in fines, according to IJ’s lawsuit.
“It’s unconstitutional because it creates a financial incentive for the city government … to ticket people,” Josh House, an IJ attorney on the case, told Fox News. He said people in the town were being “punished” for the condition of their property by having to “fund the Doraville city government.”
The Institute for Justice is doing great work.
San Francisco substitution the rent is too damn high
Restaurateurs who say they can no longer find or afford servers are figuring out how to do without them. And so in this city of staggering wealth, you can eat like a gourmand, with real stemware and ceramic plates. But first you’ll have to go get your own silverware.
…Restaurateurs here have taken a model familiar to taquerias and fast-casual, cafeteria-style places like Sweetgreen and Chipotle Mexican Grill, and pushed it further up the fine-dining food chain. Call it fast-fine, they suggest, or fine-casual. Or counter service “in a full service environment” that includes $11 cocktails and $22 pan-roasted salmon.
By the way, rent is not the only problem:
On July 1, the minimum wage in San Francisco will hit $15 an hour, following incremental raises from $10.74 in 2014. The city also requires employers with at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave.
Even the dosa is troubled:
In December, he opened a counter-service version of Dosa in Oakland. The new restaurant serves cardamom- and fenugreek-spiced cocktails. But there’s also a self-service water station, and a busing station for diners inclined to clear their own tables. (If they aren’t, an employee will do the job.)
Here is more from Emily Badger (NYT). Addendum: Hadur in the comments writes: “Who could have predicted that this would happen in America’s most high-tech city?”
Are asylum rights misguided?
Per capita income in Eritrea is about $600 a year (estimates vary however), and in El Salvador about $8000 a year, PPP-adjusted. We hear a lot about the horrible violence in El Salvador, and indeed I have been to the country only twice, and yet saw a murdered dead body simply lying alongside the highway. Here are various anecdotes about the problem, noting that not all of them involve death. Nonetheless keep in mind that life expectancy in El Salvador is a bit over 73 years. Life expectancy in Eritrea is about 64.
Yet a person from El Salvador can make his or her way to the U.S. border and plead for asylum rights, often with some justification I might add. (More generally, the number of asylum seekers from Latin America is rising rapidly.) It is much harder for an Eritrean to do the same, most of all because there is no direct land route and furthermore the paucity of resources in Eritrea makes almost any kind of action harder to pull off. Eritreans do however request and sometimes receive asylum rights through the U.S. Embassy in Eritrea itself.
So asylum rights favor El Salvadorans relative to Eritreans, at least once people realize there is an incentive to try to migrate north. Does that make sense? In general, Latin American countries are wealthier and healthier than most of the world’s other poorer countries, though they are on average more violent.
To be clear, I do not wish to revoke or limit asylum rights today. That would lead to less humane outcomes with no offsetting advantage. But say we were designing an ideal immigration policy from scratch. Would you not want to pare back asylum rights in return for allowing more legal immigration from very needy countries?
Keep in mind that a stronger chance of asylum rights for Latin Americans, or those in the Caribbean, means more dangerous journeys to get here, and thus a greater exhaustion of “migration rents” through the very process of trying. It would be possible to offer greater legal migration rights to more Eritreans, if only through a lottery (though I suspect a better method yet can be found), without inducing comparably risky or costly behavior.
Asylum rights still could be kept for situations of special humanitarian, cultural, or political importance, such as the Holocaust, Soviet Jews, or the current situation in Syria. But ask yourself a simple question: when the genocide was going on in Rwanda, how many Rwandans did the U.S. grant asylum rights to? Does that not indicate something is broken about the current system?
Consider these figures:
Immigration court records show that more asylum cases were denied over the previous five years than have been granted. In fiscal year 2016, 62 percent of asylum cases were denied, compared with 44.5 percent five years earlier. Among Mexicans and Central Americans, the approval rate is substantially lower.
You might think that is a sign of the system working along the ex post dimension, but it also indicates there is too much ex ante “regulatory arbitrage” across different immigration categories.
It seems that hundreds of millions of people in today’s world are worthy of asylum, given the criteria as written. Yet during the Obama years a typical intake was about 60,000 asylum seekers yearly, which suggests an extreme degree of moral arbitrariness. Is there not a better way to write asylum law to target…whatever you think is most worth of being targeted? Admittedly opinions on the proper standard will differ.
Or consider this:
The best case for a broad application of asylum rights is simply that it gives the authorities more discretion to accept a larger number of very worthy cases. For instance, teenager Martina Navratilova received asylum in the United States, and for the better, even though she was not facing death or torture back home in Czechoslovakia. Keep in mind, though, that (for the moment) we are designing an ideal immigration system from scratch. Cases such as Navratilova’s suggest that ordinary immigration policy ought to be more geared to taking in especially talented individuals, with or without an asylum case.
You should note, by the way, that Australia has relatively tough asylum rights, but takes in a large number of legal immigrants. The country also goes to great lengths to stop people from showing up at the border in boats and claiming asylum. So it seems there is at least one case where this is a sustainable posture.
In closing, I would note that asylum rights seem to be creating major political problems for Europe. Partially for non-rational reasons, many voters view asylum-linked immigration as “more out of control” than other kinds of migration. And the EU arguably has poorly designed institutions for handling asylum, and doling out relative responsibilities to member nations. Plus Europe is very close to the Middle East and Africa. Reforming the treatment of asylum in Europe might well improve the functioning of democracy there and actually put immigration on a more stable path.
Ethnolinguistic favoritism in African politics
African political leaders have a tendency to favor members of their own ethnic group. Yet for all other ethnic groups in a country, it is unclear whether having a similar ethnicity to the leader is beneficial. To shed light on this issue, I use a continuous measure of linguistic similarity to quantify the ethnic similarity of a leader to all ethnic groups in a country. Combined with panel data on 163 ethnic groups partitioned across 35 sub-Saharan countries, I use within-group time variation in similarity that results from a partitioned group’s concurrent exposure to multiple national leaders. Findings show that ethnic favoritism is more widespread than previously believed: in addition to evidence of coethnic favoritism, I document evidence of non-coethnic favoritism that typically goes undetected in the absence of a continuous measure of similarity. I also find that patronage tends to be targeted toward ethnic regions rather than individuals of a particular ethnic group. I relate these results to the literature on coalition building, and provide evidence that ethnicity is one of the guiding principles behind high-level government appointments.
That is from Andrew Dickens in the latest American Economic Review.
Immigration policy is hard
That is the title and topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the central analytical point, one that people are not so keen on discussing right now:
If we apply a simple economic model to the migration calculus, for the potential migrant, the expected return of trying to cross the border must exceed the overall return of staying at home. So if we improve conditions for those arriving from, say, Guatemala, more will try to come. That will result in higher prices to the border-crossing coyotes, more coercion and predation on the Mexican route along the way, bad treatment or lower wages in the U.S., or other compensating negative factors.
Basically, more and more people will leave Guatemala until the costs of leaving and staying are roughly equal.
This explains why even desirable changes to immigration policy may not have their intended effect. Improving how migrants are treated by the U.S. legal system, for example, may help those who reach the U.S., but it won’t be of much help to migrants as a group. We should still improve the immigration process, because parent-child separation is immoral, dehumanizing and, not incidentally, terrible publicity. Still, the costs of trying to migrate, and possibly failing, will negate a lot of the gains of those who make it.
I set out my proposed immigration compromise, and I argue also that current asylum law needs to be rethought, a topic to which I may return soon.
The origins of WEIRD psychology
This is one of the most important topics, right? Well, here is a new and quite thorough paper by Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. Here is the abstract:
Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.
As you might expect, a paper like this is fairly qualitative by its nature, and this one will not convince everybody. Who can separate out all those causal pathways? Even in a paper that is basically a short book.
Object all you want, but there is some chance that this is one of the half dozen most important social science and/or history papers ever written. So maybe a few of you should read it.
And the print in the references to the supplementary materials is small, so maybe I missed it, but I don’t think there is any citation to Steve Sailer, who has been pushing a version of this idea for many years.
The slippery slope
Members of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’ family were followed by the owner of the restaurant they were kicked out of over the weekend after they settled an alternative place to dine.
During an interview Monday on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s radio show, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the father of the press secretary, said Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., tailed Sanders’ in-laws across the street and along with a number of other people protested their presence at the restaurant to which they had migrated.
Sanders and her husband were said to not be present at the second restaurant.
Here is more. I still believe in freedom of association in matters such as this, but I also think you should, as a personal decision, serve Republicans at the lunch counter. This is what starts to happen when you don’t.. Civility remains underrated, and is this a good time to apply just a little behavioral economics to how the interactions might escalate.
Via Megan.
Solve for the “not a detention center” equilibrium
A spokesman for Southwest Key, Jeff Eller, said on Sunday it could not legally require children to stay on the premises if they sought to leave, and that “from time to time” children had left several of its 27 shelters for immigrant children.
“We are not a detention center,” Mr. Eller said in a statement. “We talk to them and try to get them to stay. If they leave the property, we call law enforcement.”
Federal officials echoed that position, saying they could not stop a child who attempted to leave. The officials did not respond to a question about how many children had walked away from migrant centers nationwide.
Here is the rest of the NYT article, it has further points of interest.
U.S.A. fact of the day
Number of unaccompanied minors, age 17 or lower, apprehended during or after border crossings, fiscal year 2017:
Trump aside, what exactly is the plan here?
Hat tip goes to @BaldingsWorld.
Was the Colombian peace deal so wonderful?
It seems to be increasingly unpopular with the Colombian electorate, and now there is this report:
Hundreds of Colombian farmers, activists, and community organisers have been killed over the past 18 months, despite the landmark peace deal that supposedly ended 52 years of war. For them, and for local leaders in the former conflict zones, the war – which left an estimated 220,000 dead and seven million displaced over five decades – didn’t end: it only became worse.
“Whenever we hear talk of peace, we worry,” says Anadelia Trochez, 43, president of the community council in El Ceral, a village in the Cauca Valley, the most productive coca-growing area in the country. “Out here, that usually means more trouble.”
Of course that is not the final word, but the evidence increasingly suggests it is a perspective to be taken seriously. I recall how many outsiders swooned when the initial Colombian peace deal was first announced, and how tragic they considered it when the Colombian electorate rejected the first version of the deal. Critics of the deal were considered warmongers. Those are classic signs of mood affiliation.
The pointer is from Tom Murphy.
Is the bilateral approach to trade liberalization really so bad?
That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It seems we are bureaucratizing trade as much as liberating it. Perhaps that is no surprise. If you wish to induce numerous nations to sign on to a deal, you will have to offer exceptions, clauses and conditions for them. The eventual result is that a free-trade treaty morphs into a managed-trade treaty. I still believe that the various trade agreements that have been passed or drawn up are for the better, but I also can’t help being disappointed by them. Note also that progress through the World Trade Organization had ground to a halt even before the election of Trump.
We are now in a setting where the world’s No. 2 economy — China, on its way to being No. 1 — is strongly opposed to free-trade ideals and free flows of information, especially for its own home market.
Enter bilateralism. The smartest case for trade bilateralism is that trade in many goods is already fairly free, but some egregious examples of tariffs and trade barriers remain. Look at agriculture, European restrictions on beef hormones in beef, and the Chinese unwillingness to allow in foreign companies. Targeted strategic bargaining, backed by concrete threats emanating from a relatively powerful nation — in this case the U.S. — could demand removal of those restrictions. Furthermore, the negotiating process would be more directly transactional and less cartelized and bureaucratic.
My colleague John Nye, an economist at George Mason University, has argued that the free-trade revolution of the 19th century came about because of a major trade agreement between Britain and France in 1860. Other European nations were fearful of being locked out of subsequent deals, and they hurried to sign bilateral trade treaties with Britain and France. There was a competition to make deals rather than cartelization of the process.
That said, our current pursuit of this approach does not seem to have enough allies on our side, and thus I doubt if it will work. There is much more in the rest of the column.
Will the European Union ruin the internet?
A committee of MEPs has voted to accept major changes to European copyright law, which experts say could change the nature of the internet.
They voted to approve the controversial Article 13, which critics warn could put an end to memes, remixes and other user-generated content.
Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved.
One organisation opposed to the changes called it a “dark day”.
The European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11.
It will now go to the wider European Parliament to vote on in July.
…Article 11 has been called the “link tax” by opponents.
Here is further information. If ever there was a case for Brexit…
For the pointer I thank Saku.
Is democracy in danger?
From the highly regarded Daniel Treisman:
Influential voices in academia and the media contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that the global proportion of democracies is actually at or near an all-time high; that the current rate of backsliding is not historically unusual; and that this rate is well explained by the economic characteristics of existing democracies. I confirm that breakdowns tend to occur in countries that are poor, have had relatively little democratic experience, and are in economic crisis. Extrapolating from historical data, I show that the estimated hazard of failure in a democracy as developed and seasoned as the US is extremely low — far lower than in any democracy that has ended in the past. Some suggest that undemocratic public attitudes and erosion of elite norms threaten US institutions, but there is little evidence that these factors cause democratic breakdown. While deterioration in the quality of democracy in countries such as Hungary and Poland is itself cause for concern — as is the reversion to authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey — alarm about a global slide into autocracy is inconsistent with current evidence.
The pointer is from the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Debating Space
Should there be more publicly funded space exploration? Noa Ovadia recently argued that money should be spent on more pressing needs than space travel. An expert from IBM smacked that argument down pretty convincingly:
It is very easy to say that there are more important things to spend money on, and I do not dispute this. No one is claiming that this is the only item on our expense list. But that is beside the point. As subsidizing space exploration would clearly benefit society, I maintain that this is something the government should pursue.
Oh, did I mention the expert was Dr. Watson?
*Empire of Guns*
The author is Priya Satia, and the subtitle is The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Here is one good bit:
In fact, there were so many transitions between peace and war that it is difficult to establish what “normal” economic conditions were. Eighteenth-century Europeans accepted war as “inevitable, an ordinary fact of human existence.” It was an utterly unexceptional state of affairs. For Britons in particular, war was something that happened abroad and that kept truly damaging disruption — invasion or rebellion — at bay. Wars that were disruptive elsewhere were understood as preservationist in Britain…Adam Smith’s complaints about the costs of war, about the “ruinous expedient” of perpetual funding and high public debt in peacetime, staked out a contrarian position; The Wealth of Nations (1776) was a work of persuasion. His and other voices in favor of pacific development grew louder from the margins. By denormalizing war, liberal political economy raised the stakes of the century’s long final wars from 1793 to 1815, which could be stomached only as an exceptional, apocalyptic stage on the way to permanent peace.
In their wake, nineteenth-century Britain packaged their empire as a primarily civilian enterprise focused on liberty, forgetting the earlier collective investment in and profit from the wars that had produced it..
The book offers many points of interest.