Category: Law

Robert Sampson writes in today’s NYT Op-Ed page:

…evidence points to increased immigration as a major factor associated with the lower crime rate of the 1990’s (and its recent leveling off).

Hispanic Americans do better on a range of various social indicators — including propensity to violence — than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages.  My colleagues and I have completed a study in which we examined 8,000 Chicago residents who were asked about the characteristics of their neighborhoods.

Surprisingly, we found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans than among blacks and whites…Indeed, the first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) in our study were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than were third-generation Americans, adjusting for family and neighborhood background. [TC: But don’t absolute probabilities play the key role here?  And should we compare Mexicans to "blacks and whites" or to each group in isolation?]  Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation.

Our study further showed that living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigrants is directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of factors…)

Alas, there is no permalink these days.  Here is the relevant project which generated the data.  No one of Sampson’s pieces on his web page seems to cover this result, though many are relevant more broadly.  Also see this summary of his criticism of "broken window" and "tipping point" theories of crime.

Here is another piece which seems to support the basic result that Mexican immigration lowers crime.  Here is a survey article on the topic.  This piece (see p.113) suggests that crime is lower in border cities than comparable non-border cities, and that Mexican immigration cannot be identified as a cause of a higher U.S. crime rate.

Yes comments are open, but purely anecdotal accounts of how you were once mugged by a Mexican, or how your neighborhood just isn’t "the same anymore" are discouraged.  I’m posting a version of this over at Volokh Conspiracy as well, look for the differing comments.

Addendum: Read Alex on this topic.

Alan Krueger writes:

In a new book, "Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting
Competition?" (Upjohn Institute, 2006), Morris M. Kleiner, an economist
at the University of Minnesota, questions whether occupational
licensing has gone too far. He provides much evidence that the balance
of occupational licensing has shifted away from protecting consumers
and toward limiting the supply of workers in various professions. A
result is that services provided by licensed workers are more expensive
than necessary and that quality is not noticeably affected.

Read more here.  I can’t yet find this listed on Amazon.com, any pointers?  Here is a pdf of part of the book.  Here is a home page for the book.

My colleagues in GMUs school of law can be justly proud of how quickly their program has risen in the rankings.  TaxProfBlog excerpts from a National Review article:

Mason vaulted from 71st place in 1995 to 41st in 2005 — an
impressive achievement given that these rankings tend to remain static
from year to year…

To use a baseball metaphor, Manne was a scout who specialized in the
minor leagues. Whereas his competitors were obsessed with signing
big-name free agents in hot fields such as feminist legal theory, Manne
quietly assembled a team of undervalued unknowns. "If the market
discriminates against conservatives, then there should be good
opportunities for hiring conservatives," says Polsby. This is exactly
the sort of observation one would expect a market-savvy
law-and-economics scholar to make… "Have you read Moneyball?" asks Todd
Zywicki, another one of Mason’s bright young profs, in reference to the
best-selling book by Michael Lewis on how the Oakland Athletics
franchise assembled playoff-caliber teams on a limited budget. "We’re
the Oakland A’s of the law-school world."

Especially interesting is that GMU is probably undervalued relative to its academic achievement.

[GMU] probably would do even better but for the particular ways U.S.
News calculates worth: Forty percent of a school’s ranking is based on
reputation, as determined by judges and lawyers (15 percent) and law
professors (25 percent). "If we had Dartmouth or Princeton’s name,"
says Polsby, picking two well-regarded schools that don’t have law
programs, "we’d be a top-20 school overnight." …

Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Texas, has created
several ranking systems that rely entirely on objective criteria. It
might be said, for instance, that a school is only as good as its
students. The 75th-percentile LSAT score of Mason’s entering class in
the fall of 2005 was 166 — enough to tie it for 22nd best (with seven
other schools). It might also be said that a school is only as good as
its professors. To measure this, Leiter has created a "scholarly
impact" rating based on faculty per capita citations in scholarly
journals and books. On this scale, Mason ties for 23rd (with four other
schools). Then there’s the Social Science Research Network, which
counts the number of times faculty papers are downloaded from the
Internet; over the last twelve months, Mason professors rank
eleventh….

There were many social changes between 1970 and 1980 that could have affected the gains to marriage over the decade. A major change was the national legalization of abortion in 1973. Legal abortions were partially available in some states by 1970. If the partial legalization of abortions in a state reduced the gains to marriage in that state, we would expect to see lower gains to marriage in the early legalizing states relative to later legalizing states in 1970 but not in 1980. Moreover, this difference in difference in the gains to marriage should be concentrated among women of childbearing age. Using marriage rate regressions, Angrist and Evans (1999) showed that the marriage rates of young men and women were lower in early legalizing states relative to later legalizing states in the early 1970s.  We show that the stimates of the number of marriages affected are sensitive to whether we use male or female marriage rate regressions. We extend the benchmark model to include whether an individual resided in a state that allowed legal   abortions or not as part of the definition of the type of an individual. Methodologically, we extend the standard difference in differences estimator to estimate the effect of a policy change on bivariate distributions. Estimating this  extended model, we show that the partial legalization of abortion in some states can explain up to 20 percent of the drop in the gains to marriage among young adults in the 1970s. 

That is from "Who Marries Whom and Why," by Eugene Choo and Aloysius Chow, in the January 2006 Journal of Political Economy. Here is an earlier version of the paper.   

There is surely some irony in that fact that you
can now be prosecuted in Europe for denying a genocide and prosecuted
in Turkey for asserting that a genocide took place.

Here is more.

"Sometimes it takes five or six interviews to break these girls [prostitutes], to let
them know we’re the good guys," said [police officer] Stack, noting that many have an
inherent distrust of law enforcement officers. "We haven’t gotten any
trafficking victims from these cases. It’s not because we haven’t
spoken to them. It’s not because we’re not trying. It’s just very
difficult to make these girls flip."

Here is the full story.

Liberals are claiming that President Bush has violated constitutional restrictions on torture and spying on Americans.  Don’t they understand that the constitution is a living document that must be reinterpreted in light of new events and understandings?  An originalist reading of the constitution would throw us back into the
primitive past when the minimum wage was unconstitutional.  Fortunately, conservatives know that constitutional interpretation must change with the times and never more so than now.  We live in a different world.  The Founding Fathers may have been great in their time but they did not face the problems that we face today and we should not be bound by their 18th century ideas of liberty and executive tyranny.

I tend to put on my right-wing public-choice hat here, and side with GooglePrint. The private beneficiaries from assigning too much of the value of innovation to the dead hand of old property rights are concentrated. The private beneficiaries of assigning too little of the value are diffuse. In a public-choice world ruled by lobbyists, there will be strong pressures on legislation and law to overprotect existing property. And it is the duty of intellectuals seeking the sweet spot to push back–to be an anti-lobbyist lobby.

That is Brad DeLong, here is a longer son & dad discussion.

Is this left-wing fantasy or unpleasant truth?

Roughly speaking, most European countries have adopted a regulatory model in order to keep corporate abuse in check. There are drawbacks to this model, but it does result in relatively few lawsuits. Conversely, in the United States, business-friendly conservatives have fought to keep regulation light. This often leaves lawsuits, which are inevitably less predictable and more arbitrary than regulation, as the only avenue that ordinary citizens have for checking corporate abuse.

But Geoghegan points out that it’s not just inadequate regulation that has led to the rise in torts. It’s also the demise of unions. In the past, he says, employee grievances from unionized workers were mostly handled via arbitration, which is quick and easy. But with arbitration mostly gone, largely replaced by a mass of confusing and poorly enforced civil rights legislation, the only remedy an employee has if she’s unjustly fired is a lawsuit, and this is fundamentally a more scorched-earth process than old style arbitration…

Is the Vioxx decision in fact the best argument for the FDA?  Should we move, as Alex has suggested, to make FDA-approved drugs immune from such lawsuits?  Can we precommit to taking certain actions out of the legal nexus in this fashion?  File this one under "Top Ten Topics I Wish People Would Study More."

Here is Kevin Drum’s full post and review.  Addendum: Here is Jane Galt’s excellent response, read it.