Category: Law

Jay Wilson, a second-year law student at New York University, was
desperate to register for a popular course in constitutional law.

Unfortunately for him, the course, taught by the youthful Daryl
Levinson, was completely booked for the upcoming spring semester.
Fortunately, Mr. Wilson had some money to spare. In a posting on an
online bulletin board at the law school, Mr. Wilson offered $300 to any
student willing to drop the course to make room for him…

Students interviewed at the law school said the practice of
exchanging course spots is common at the school. As a kind gesture,
some cash-strapped students have promised to bake cookies for willing
traders or pass them invitations to exclusive parties.

Mr. Wilson, they said, took things to a new level: a no-nonsense
business deal, the sort of financial transaction that they expect to
deal with only after graduation.

Of course, the authorities soon moved to quash such deals.  The dean, however, did not explain why paying to get into a class is wrong but paying to get into law school is good.  Hmmm….perhaps Mr. Wilson would have had better luck had he offered to pay the dean rather than another student.

I have pioneered this approach even further.  Students in my classes have been known to offer payment to get out. 🙂

Thanks to Ray Lehmann for the link.

I edited a book, Changing the Guard, on private prisons and crime control.  Last week I received an interesting letter from an expert in the field….a prisoner in Tennessee.  Frankly, I was expecting a crank but in fact the prisoner, who shall remain anonymous, had a lot of intelligent things to say about how the prison system operates.  Here is one observation:

A privately owned and publicly traded company like CCA has no incentive to rehabilitate criminals.  It is in the best interests of the company for even more criminals to exist.  Unfortunately, the same is true of government run prisons.  And contrary to what you may have been told, prisoners are not paroled because they have indicated by their actions or behaviors while inside that they are less likely to reoffend; they are let go because the Parole Boards believe that will commit another crime.  This way the prison lobbyists can then "prove" that parole doesn’t work.  The Department of Corrections gets less money from paroled prisoners than it does for those kept inside.  And also, "good" inmates are less trouble (less labor) than the trouble-makers, and so trouble-makers get released.

Good analysis.  I hope, however, that he does not test his theory on how to gain early release.

What would happened if all of America’s roughly 600,000 cohabitating gay couples decided to marry?

For one thing, they would all start paying the marriage penalty. Each year, over the next five years, the deficit would fall about $350-450 million per year. Yes that is about one-tenth of one percent of the yearly deficit, but at least a move in the right direction. It is also estimated that social security and related expenditures would increase only slightly as a result of the marriages.

That is from The Atlantic Monthly, October issue, p.64. If you are looking for a good historical introduction to some of the issues surrounding gay marriage, I recommend George Chauncey’s recent Why Marriage?.

Dieting is difficult because it’s so much easier to give in to temptation and consume what you should not. It’s a constant struggle to cut the fat. The same is true in business. Economists may write down a “cost curve” on the blackboard but these curves, which represent the minimum cost of producing a particular quantity, are not given to the firm they are products of the firm. It takes effort and attention and willpower to keep costs low. Letting costs go by raising salaries, increasing benefits and paying little attention to the bottom line is easy and, for a time, pleasant which is why firms need strong incentives, including the carrot of profit and the stick of loss, to get and stay trim.

Government agencies face few such incentives. As a result, fat is rampant. Case in point, California prison guards. To encourage fitness the California Department of Corrections created a fitness bonus some years ago. The bonus was quite substantial, $100 per month but to get it guards had to pass a fitness test involving sit-ups, running and jumping. Five years ago the state paid out about $5 million for the fitness incentive. But who wants to be the bad guy who denies a prison guard a bonus? No one – if they aren’t paying the bills.

As a result, the fitness test started to get easier as the bonus got larger. Last year, California shelled out $33.2 million for fitness bonuses and some 80 percent of prison employees, not just guards but wardens and mangers also, now get the fitness bonus. Of course, a test is no longer required – all the employee need do to get the bonus is visit a doctor once per year.

With the California budget crunch even the politically poweful prison guards are having to cut some fat but in the long run recognize the incentive structure and don’t expect government to go on a diet.

Our guest bloggers are second to none but you might also be interested to know that Richard Posner is guest blogging at Larry Lessig’s blog. I recently argued in favor of renewal fees for copyright thus I was pleased to see that Posner is also in favor of a copyright renewal system (he even wants to sneak such a system in through the back door of fair use).

If tenants benefit from a law that says apartments must have hot water then surely a law that says tenants must have hot water and a dishwasher benefits them even more, right? What about a law that says tenants must have hot water, a dishwasher and cable tv? By now the students have cottoned on to the idea that the rent will increase. Once you realize that the law causes the rent to increase it’s no longer obvious if tenants benefit or if landlords are harmed.

We can work out what happens with sone numbers. Let’s suppose that after much bargaining the tenant and landlord have agreed upon the rent and the amenities – each party to the contract is profit maximizing, doing as well as they can given market conditions and the interests of the other. Now suppose that tenants value the hot water benefit at $100 and that it costs the landlord $150 to provide the hot water. At these prices the tenant does not buy the hot water. The law is passed; by how much does the rent increase? By at least $100 but no more than $150. The landlord knows for certain that he can increase the rent by $100 because this will make the tenant just as well off as he was before, which by assumption was an equilibrium price. Similarly, if the landlord could profitably raise the rent by more than his cost he would have done so already – the fact that he did not indicates that an increase of more than $150 would not be profitable

Thus the rent rises somewhere between $100 and $150, the precise amount to be determined by bargaining power. Suppose that the rent increases by $120. Then the tenant gets a benefit worth $100 at a price of $120 and is worse off by $20 and the landlord gets a benefit of $120 at a cost of $150 and so is worse off by $30. The law makes both the landlord and tenant worse off!

The lesson here is that a contract is multi-dimensional so if the government changes one dimension of a contract the other dimensions will adjust towards offsetting that change.

Bonus points: a) Suppose the tenant values the hot water at $150 and it cost the landlord $100. Does the regulation benefit the tenant and landlord now?. If so, what is odd about this example? b) Explain why the loss to the tenant and the loss to the landlord must add up to $50. How does this further illustrate the principle?