Category: Law

Sentence reductions in Brazil

Brazilian prisoners are now able to shorten their sentences by reading books and writing essays about them.

…four days less for every book they read.  Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil’s most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced.

Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,” said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.

The story is here, and for the pointer I thank David Zetland.  Here is the Reddit discussion.

The Massachusetts health care reform reduced emergency room visits

I just spotted a new paper by Sarah Miller (a fellow Messiaen fan), who seems to be on the job market this year from U. Illinois:

Abstract:This paper analyzes the impact of a major health reform in Massachusetts on emergency room (ER) visits. I exploit the variation in pre-reform uninsurance rate across counties to identify the causal effect of the reform on ER visits. My estimates imply that the reform reduced ER usage by about 8 percent, nearly all of which is accounted for by a reduction in non-urgent visits that could be treated in alternative settings. In contrast, I find no effect for non-preventable emergencies such as heart attacks. These estimates are consistent with a large causal effect of insurance on ER usage and imply that expanding insurance coverage could have a substantial impact on the efficiency of health services.

Don’t worry, I’ll get back to Stuxnet and related topics by Thursday.

Privatization in Sandy Springs, Georgia

Cities have dabbled for years with privatization, but few have taken the idea as far as Sandy Springs. Since the day it incorporated, Dec. 1, 2005, it has handed off to private enterprise just about every service that can be evaluated through metrics and inked into a contract.

To grasp how unusual this is, consider what Sandy Springs does not have. It does not have a fleet of vehicles for road repair, or a yard where the fleet is parked. It does not have long-term debt. It has no pension obligations. It does not have a city hall, for that matter, if your idea of a city hall is a building owned by the city. Sandy Springs rents.

The town does have a conventional police force and fire department, in part because the insurance premiums for a private company providing those services were deemed prohibitively high. But its 911 dispatch center is operated by a private company, iXP, with headquarters in Cranbury, N.J.

And:

Applying for a business license? Speak to a woman with Severn Trent, a multinational company based in Coventry, England. Want to build a new deck on your house? Chat with an employee of Collaborative Consulting, based in Burlington, Mass. Need a word with people who oversee trash collection? That would be the URS Corporation, based in San Francisco.

Even the city’s court, which is in session on this May afternoon, next to the revenue division, is handled by a private company, the Jacobs Engineering Group of Pasadena, Calif. The company’s staff is in charge of all administrative work, though the judge, Lawrence Young, is essentially a legal temp, paid a flat rate of $100 an hour.

The full story is here.  The article has many interesting points, such as this:

Town leaders say race had nothing to do with it. Mayor Galambos said, “A 94 percent vote in favor of incorporation speaks to the broad community support for self-government and a desire to have local dollars remain local.”

And this:

To dissuade companies from raising prices or reducing the quality of service, the town awarded contracts to a couple of losing bidders for every winner it hired. The contracts do not come with any pay or any work — unless the winning bidder that prevailed fails to deliver. It’s a bit like the Miss America pageant anointing the runner-up as the one who will fulfill the winner’s duties if, for some reason, Miss America cannot.

In a stand-alone sense, the town seems to be working quite well.

Posner throws out Apple-Motorola Case

As suggested by earlier rulings, Posner has thrown out the entire Apple-Motorola case. As I argued in Launching the Innovation Renaissance our patent system has became a weapon wielded by large corporations against competitor innovations. Posner’s ruling is complex but one point is clear he thinks that the courts should not act as a second in these corporate battles:

…The danger that Apple’s goal in obtaining an injunction is harassment of its bitter rival, requiring particularly watchful supervision by the court should it issue the injunction, is suggested by the fact that while a delayed injunction would in principle render no benefit to Apple besides harming its competitor by forcing it to waste time and money finding a new way of performing the functions now performed in an allegedly infringing manner, an ongoing royalty would yield significant income to Apple—yet which it wants to forgo in favor of imposing costs and litigation burdens on its adversary.

The notion that these minor-seeming infringements have cost Apple market share and consumer goodwill is implausible, has virtually no support in the record, and so fails to indicate that the benefits to Apple from an injunction would exceed the costs to Motorola. An injunction that imposes greater costs on the defendant than it confers benefits on the plaintiff reduces net social welfare. That is the insight behind the “balance of hard-ships” component of the eBay standard for injunctive relief in patent cases.

Hat tip: @postlibertarian.

Will Uruguay legalize marijuana?

Uruguay is showing a novel approach to Latin America’s growing fatigue with the war on drugs with a new proposal: normalize marijuana use and hand over its distribution and marketing to the government.

Under a plan Defense Minister Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro announced late Wednesday, which the leftist government will soon present to lawmakers, the state will oversee sales, which would be allowed only to adults 18 and older.

The article is here, here is more, hat tip goes to @EndeavoringE.

Institutions and Islamic Law

Adeel Malik has a very interesting essay responding to Timur Kuran’s excellent book The Long Divergence. There are many previous MR posts on Kuran’s thesis that Islamic law impeded the transition to impersonal exchange in the Middle East (see here and here).

I think The Long Divergence is one of the most important recent contributions to New Institutional Economics (incidentally I reviewed it for Public Choice). Malik takes on board Kuran’s main argument but then argues that it is not institutional enough because it does not tackle the argument that Islamic law was endogenous to the politics of the region.

‘Islamic law can be described, at best, as a proximate rather than a deep determinant of development, and that there is limited evidence to establish it as a causal claim. Finally, I propose that, rather than exclusively concentrating on legal impediments to development, a more promising avenue for research is to focus on the co-evolution of economic and political exchange, and to probe why the relationship between rulers and merchants differed so markedly between the Ottoman Empire and Europe.’

The Google-Trolley Problem

As you probably recall, the trolley problem concerns a moral dilemma. You observe an out-of-control trolley hurtling towards five people who will surely die if hit by the trolley. You can throw a switch and divert the trolley down a side track saving the five but with certainty killing an innocent bystander. There is no opportunity to warn or otherwise avoid the disaster. Do you throw the switch?

A second version is where you stand on a bridge with a fat man. The only way to stop the trolling killing five is to push the fat man in front of the trolley. Do you do so? Some people say no to both and many say yes to switching but no to pushing, referring to errors of omission and commission. You can read about the moral psychology here.

I want to ask a different question. Suppose that you are a programmer at Google and you are tasked with writing code for the Google-trolley. What code do you write? Should the trolley divert itself to the side track? Should the trolley run itself into a fat man to save five? If the Google-trolley does run itself into the fat man to save five should Sergey Brin be charged? Do your intuitions about the trolley problem change when we switch from the near view to the far (programming) view?

I think these questions are very important: Notice that the trolley problem is a thought experiment but the Google-trolley problem is a decision that now must be made.

Luigi Zingales defends Glass-Steagall

Last but not least, Glass-Steagall helped restrain the political power of banks. Under the old regime, commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies had different agendas, so their lobbying efforts tended to offset one another. But after the restrictions ended, the interests of all the major players were aligned. This gave the industry disproportionate power in shaping the political agenda. This excessive power has damaged not only the economy but the financial sector itself. One way to combat this excessive power, if only partially, is to bring Glass-Steagall back.

There is much more at the link (“Why I was won over by Glass-Steagall”), interesting throughout.  An ungated version is here.

Posner on Patents

Our patent law is by and large judge created and thus it is judges rather than legislators who are responsible for most of the dysfunction in patent law. It was judges who expanded (or endorsed) patents to cover business methods, software and animals. It was judges who weakened the obviousness, enablement and possession requirements. Finally, it was judges who interpreted vague patents broadly, thereby midwifing fearsome patent trolls.

Fortunately, judges also have the power to reform patent law which is why Judge Posner’s recent suggestion that he may dismiss with prejudice the Apple v. Google/Motorola  suit over smartphone patents is potentially ground breaking.

We don’t yet have a full ruling but in early rulings Posner referred to claims made by Apple and Motorola as “silly” and “ridiculous.” Most importantly, Posner has said:

“injunctive relief would impose costs disproportionate to the harm to the patentee and the benefit of the alleged infringement to the alleged infringer and would be contrary to the public interest….”

which I read as saying that Posner is tired of the patent system being used by big business as a cudgel against competitive innovation.

Posner is a founder of the law and economics movement and one of the most influential judges in America. Indeed, as I have said before, Posner is the only person in the world who deserves a Nobel prize in economics and a seat on the Supreme Court so this ruling will be closely followed.

Absurd Patent of the Day

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…Apple has been awarded a patent on wedge-shaped computers. Once again it is difficult to see why this sort of competition-stifling government-enforced monopoly would be beneficial to the overall cause of innovation. It’s absolutely true that the record should reflect the fact that Apple made wedge-shaped computers popular and the new wave of Ultrabooks are slightly lame imitators. But we progress as a society because of imitators! People come up with good ideas and then those ideas spread.

Copied from Matt Yglesias who I take it will not mind that I am helping to spread good ideas.

Malcolm Gladwell on Bill James

James turns out to be not just the most important writer/thinker on baseball of our generation but also — completely unexpectedly — to have read more books in the true crime genre than maybe anyone else alive. In Popular Crime he works his way though every major true crime story of the last 200 years — from Lizzie Borden to JonBenet Ramsey — making (as one would expect) all kinds of brilliant, wildly entertaining and occasionally completely nutty Jamesian observations. Why Popular Crime wasn’t a huge bestseller, I have no idea. OK. Maybe I do. It’s 496 pages …

That is from Gladwell’s dialogue with Bill Simmons, much of which covers talent allocation and talent spotting, channeled through the medium of sports, and how technology, talent, and fame interact.

The economy that is Singapore

At S$86,889 ($67,000) just for a permit, the total price of a Volkswagen Passat in Singapore is about the same as the median U.S. metropolitan home. A 25 percent jump in residents in seven years, coupled with the world’s highest proportion of millionaire households, has fueled a 10-fold surge in license prices over three years. The government said last week it will postpone plans to cut the number of permits available and slow traffic growth, responding to the outcry over soaring prices.

…A new 2012 Passat sedan made by Volkswagen AG (VOW), the world’s second-largest carmaker, costs about $152,000 in Singapore, including the license, according to classified ads website SGCarMart.com. The median price of a U.S. metropolitan area home is $158,100, National Association of Realtors data show.

So-called open-category permit, which can be used to buy any type of vehicle, reached S$92,010 in April, the highest since the end of 1994 when a record of S$110,500 was reached. At the latest auction May 23, the licenses went for S$86,889, compared with S$8,501 three years ago. The permits give the right to own a car for 10 years. The next auction is tomorrow.

Besides having to bid for certificates at auctions that are held every two weeks, Singaporeans also pay registration fees and taxes that can amount to 150 percent of the market value of a vehicle, according to the Land Transport Authority website.

There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Ken Feinstein.