Category: Law

Women in Mauritania who press charges for sexual assault face the risk
of jail time because of poorly defined laws and stigma that criminalise
victims rather than offenders, according to a local UN-funded
non-profit.

Here is the story.  The twittering of RachelStrohm is actually the best "Africa blog" I've seen, ever.  (I very much like Chris Blattman but I would describe his blogging as broader than that.)  Her blog blog is here.  Her Google profile is here.

That's the headline and Greg Mankiw comments.  My point is a simple one: if this administration is so pro-science, should they not attempt to move major antitrust trials away from the jury system?

Some commentators are suggesting that the demonstrated political clout of the banking lobby suggests a growing need for antitrust enforcement.  Yet the pre-crash banking system was not a prime candidate for legal strictures on the grounds of competition policy.  Citigroup arguably is too big in absolute terms, and had too many contacts in high places, but antitrust policy, and the underlying theory and legal precedents, puts far more emphasis on relative market share.  In fact the unfolding of the crisis is an object lesson in how antitrust policy doesn't target the real competitive abuses much at all.  Furthermore the sin of Citigroup has been to lose money and become insolvent (or nearly so), not successful monopolization.  Those are close to being exact opposites.

At many blogs (Sullivan, Yglesias, DeLong, among others) you will find ongoing arguments for prosecuting the torturers who ran our government for a while.  I am in agreement with the moral stance of these critics but I don't agree with their practical conclusions.  I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors.  That's why we can't proceed and Obama probably understands that.  If another attack happened this would be all the more true.

On top of everything else, major Democrats in Congress are likely complicit and the Democrats as a whole hardly made this a campaign issue in 2004; in 2008 the economy was their winning issue, not torture.

One of the excellent students in my Law and Literature class wrote the following sentence in his final paper:

In some of the books, and almost all of the movies we have seen that the law goes as far as people are willing to support it.

That sad truth is another cost of the practice of torture.  The American public, now having affiliated itself with torture, will be reluctant to condemn torture for some time to come.  The "endowment effect" here seems to be strong.

An acquittal or mistrial would lose the chunk of world opinion that Obama has been winning back.  And a trial might prompt another terrorist attack, if only to force acquittal and make America look bad once again.

Pushing for prosecution would more likely endanger rule of law than preserve it, which is a sorry state of affairs.

Addendum: Here is more from Matt Yglesias.

David writes his request:

Same question I asked last time: Do you think that, say, 10 years from now, the regulations will have changed so that, instead of a No-fly list, there will be a May-fly list, so that the government will not allow people to fly unless they're on the list?

I am confused by the question.  Arguably foreigners are the biggest problem for any "No-fly" list.  There are so many of them, and they have so many unusual, overly common, or hard to transliterate names that we will never have a usable "May-fly" list of foreigners.  Just a badly designed "No-fly" list.  Given that is the case, it would be politically very difficult to apply an even tougher "May-fly" standard to U.S. citizens.

So I don't think the nature of the list will change, but perhaps I have not understood David's question.

Via Geekpress.com:

Sweden's tax authorities are cracking down on unreported webcam stripper income.
They estimate that hundreds of Swedish women are dodging the law,
resulting in a tax loss of about 40m Swedish kronor (£3.3m) annually.

The
search involves tax officials examining stripper websites, hours upon
hours, for completely legitimate purposes. A slightly disheveled
project leader said 200 Swedish strippers had been investigated so far,
adding the total could be as much as 500. "They are young girls, we can
see from the photos. We think that perhaps they are not well informed
about the rules," he said.

Here is the cited link.  Here is one story.

This is from only one county, but I found these numbers (check out the table) instructive:

About 2 percent of the people charged with major violent crimes in
Prince William County last year were illegal immigrants, but they were
arrested for a larger portion of secondary offenses, according to newly
released statistics and a Washington Post analysis that offer the first
comprehensive look at criminal activity since the county implemented
its controversial anti-illegal immigration measures.

The crime of prostitution has the highest percentage of illegal immigrants as arrestees, namely 21.4 percent.  If you are wondering, the new county procedure is to check the immigration status of everyone taken into custody. A few points:

1. Immigration has worked much better in northern Virginia than in many other parts of the country, most of all southern California.  The number will not be this low in many other locales.

2. I don't have a number for the percentage of illegal immigrants in Prince William County, but I believe there are many, albeit a falling number.

3. I am not convinced by the argument that illegal immigrants will try "especially hard" not to get caught, because they are illegal immigrants and do not wish to be deported.  This argument has been used to suggest that two percent is an underestimate.

4. When all is said and done, two percent is a fairly low number.

Ezra had this good bit:

Due to D.C.'s strange system of governance, the District's laws are
subject to approval by Congress. If D.C. passes a gay marriage
ordinance, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and
the subcommittee that handles District matters will have to either
reject D.C.'s decision or accept it. If they reject it, the outrage
from gay donors and activist groups will be overwhelming. If they
approve it, even on federalist grounds, the Right will argue that
Congress has literally approved gay marriage.

The interesting question is why there is so much opposition to legal gay marriage (which I favor).  You can cite various evil opponents and their evil motives, but there are many good people who aren't all that enthusiastic about the idea.

Jennifer Roback Morse offers the argument that gay marriage requires ongoing statist intervention (as does the notion of a corporation) and will drive the Mennonites from Quebec.

I have a simple hypothesis about the cross-sectional econometrics.  If you take the heterosexual couples who engage in the practice which is sometimes "associated" with male gay marriage, I predict those couples will favor legal gay marriage to an astonishingly high degree.  Their marriage is already "affiliated" with that practice, and so the notion of legally married gay men (and the practices which go along with that) does not constitute an extra and unwanted affiliation for their marriage ideal.

Now, if you are a rational heterosexual Bayesian and neither engage in that associated practice nor favor legal gay marriage, and then you learn about these cross-sectional econometrics, what should you infer about the correctness of your point of view?

If you're still not sure, reread Gulliver's Travels and get back to me.

Addendum: Comment 51 is apparently from Roissy.

This passage reminded me of the Greg Mankiw student who wanted to boost spending through destruct-lotteries on dollar bills.  But this is a way to encourage tax reporting:

It seems tax evasion was a problem for the government in a country
where credit cards are not widely accepted and small business transacts
most business.  The government hit upon the idea of a sales lottery
rather than a sales tax.  Every sales receipt has a lottery number
printed on its back.  Once a month, the government publishes several
newspaper pages of winning numbers.  You can win anywhere between $5
and about $200 if you have a lucky sales receipt.

The government’s theory was everybody would demand a sales receipt
if they had a chance of winning a lottery.  You play anytime you make a
purchase; no matter how small a purchase.  The result is, as the island
has become more prosperous, most people don’t want to bother with
combing through thousands of lucky numbers in a newspaper once a month
to maybe win $5.  Charities stepped in.  Along many streets you see
clear plastic canisters promoting various charitable causes soliciting
your sales receipts.  Retired volunteers go over the numbers on
receipts collected.  It gives non profits a source of funding and gives
old people a steady way to contribute without hard physical labor.  The
Yngge Ceramics Museum I visited last Saturday collected sales receipts
instead of charging admission.  If you were without a sales receipt
(unlikely in this country) you could run across the street to 7-11 and
buy a piece of candy for pennies and come back with a sales receipt.

Here is the full story and thanks to Joel Cretan for the pointer.  Read the whole post, it makes many other interesting points about Taiwan.

You may claim a kidnapped child as your dependent if the following requirements
are met:

1. The child must be presumed by law enforcement to have been kidnapped by
   someone who is not a member of your family or a member of the child's family,
   and
2. The child had, for the taxable year in which the kidnapping occurred,
   the same principal place of abode as the taxpayer for more than one-half of
   the portion of such year before the date of kidnapping.

• The dependency exemption
• The child tax credit, and
• Head of household or qualifying widow(er) with dependent child filing
  status.

This tax treatment will cease to apply as of your first tax year beginning
after the calendar year in which either there is a determination that the
child is dead or the child would have reached age 18, whichever occurs first. 

For more information, refer to Publication 501, Exemptions, Standard
Deduction, and Filing Information.

I thank The Browser for the pointer.