The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Strahilevitz: How's My Driving? For Everything and Everyone

On January 24, 2007, Lior Strahilevitz delivered a Chicago's Best Ideas talk on his notion that we should all be subject to a program like the "How's My Driving?" program you see on the backs of trucks. The truck program saves lives, and Professor Stahilevitz argues that in this case, more is better. Strahilevitz also hinted that this sort of communal feedback system could be used for much more than our nation's roadways. Intrinsically fascinating, and caused half the packed room to raise hands for questions. You can hear this talk here. For those who want to read the full paper and have access to SSRN, here's the link. Description from the posters after the jump.

Teaching Antitrust at Chicago

Danny Sokol, a former student of mine now teaching antitrust at Wisconsin, has arranged a series of posts on his Antitrust & Competition Policy blog addressing how different professors approach teaching antitrust. Here is what I said.

This year, I am teaching three classes—Antitrust, Network Industries and Copyright—and one seminar, Antitrust and IP Policy. I think of Antitrust and Network Industries as a nice, somewhat integrated two-quarter—we do quarters at Chicago—sequence: Antitrust, a class on the regulation of artificial monopoly, and Network Industries, a class on the regulation of natural monopoly. (We also have a separate Telecommunications Law class and there is some overlap between that class and Network Industries.) The name of the seminar really should be Whatever Randy Wants to Read Right Now; last year, it was classics in the secondary copyright literature; this year it is recently published articles or draft articles on antitrust.

Coase Lecture: Culling Chickens

The annual Ronald H. Coase Lecture in Law and Economics is geared towards our first year law students. This year's lecture, on January 23, 2007, was delivered by Professor Anup Malani and titled "Culling Chickens." Professor Malani spoke about prevention of the spread of avian flu in chickens, particularly, although not exclusively, in third world countries. Much of the discussion centered around the economic principles that go into determining the appropriate rate to pay for potentially-diseased chickens in order to ensure that farmers will indeed turn them over for slaughter.  A lively Q&A followed, and you can listen to the whole thing here.

More Blog Reading?

I am running blogs in connection with both of my classes this quarter. These are student posts on readings and other materials related to the class. For Network Industries, visit the syllabus here and the blog here; for my Antitrust and IP Policy seminar, the readings are here and the blog here.

Privatizing the Lottery - and other Things

Assume state run lotteries. (We do have them after all, so it is not as if we need always start from first principles. If there were a good reason to prefer the privatization of Illinois's or another state's lottery, then of course we should proceed even if the first-best world had been one with no state-sponsored lottery. Besides, there are some good arguments for a lottery, and indeed for one that does not have a thin profit margin. Even a good libertarian could say that inasmuch as the government is not coercing persons to play the lottery, and there are many private alternatives for gamblers, a state lottery is not the worst of all evils. Some people might actually like playing it, and that must count for something, just as some small investors seem to like paying for stock market advice.)

Bickel, Jackson – and Bush

Recently the Bush administration has submitted its warrantless surveillance program to examination by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, after maintaining vigorously that it need not do so.  It is unclear what, exactly, the administration is asking the Court to do, and the administration refers obscurely to “new legal developments”; but let us suppose that at least part of the administration’s motive is to avoid a judicial and legislative test of the program’s legality, by rendering litigation moot and dampening the impetus for congressional oversight.  In litigation over the detention of enemy combatants, the administration has sometimes pulled off a similar maneuver, as when it transferred Jose Padilla from military detention to the criminal justice system in order to moot pending litigation.  Many critics find these actions objectionable.  Are they?

Selling the Illinois Lottery

Apparently the government has a new strategy for raising revenues: first declare that only the government can provide a service and then, after deciding that the private sector might actually do a better job of it, auction off the right to the highest bidder. Voila! The government gets a bunch of money and doesn’t have to raise taxes. I hate to sound like what everyone thinks that we sound like at Chicago but am I the only one offended—deeply offended actually—by the suggestion that Illinois is going to sell its lottery to private parties? My ire isn’t about private lotteries; rather it is about fake government monopolies and the hidden taxation that they represent.

"Supreme Conflict"

Jan Crawford Greenburg, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, has just published an already-widely-noted book, "Supreme Conflict," on the Supreme Court and its Justices.  Here is a long excerpt from the book's introduction, which includes some interesting news about Justice O'Connor's decision to retire; here is a Washington Post op-ed, excerpted from the book, discussing the nominations and confirmations of Justices Alito and Roberts, and also the nomination and withdrawal of Harriet Miers; here is a Wall Street Journal piece discussing the Justice Thomas's views and contributions (which, in Greenburg's view, are often and unjustifiably overlooked, or lumped in with Justice Scalia's); and here is a television interview with the author.

Fighting over Fashion IP Rights

The University of Virginia Law Review has a new online format to encourage scholarly conversations—well, I think that they are hoping for something just a tad more civilized than Jerry Springer but not too much so—over recent articles in the UVaLRev. The first In Brief is now up. The target article is The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design by Kal Raustiala (of UCLA law) and Chris Sprigman (a Chicago grad and currently of Virginia law). I respond as does Rochelle Dreyfuss (of NYU law). We mobblogged the paper here in November.

 

Libertarian Paternalism

For several years, Richard Thaler and I have been working on the topic of "libertarian paternalism." The basic idea is that private and public institutions might nudge people in directions that will make their lives go better, without eliminating freedom of choice. The paternalism consists in the nudge; the libertarianism consists in the insistence on freedom, and on imposing little or no cost on those who seek to go their own way. (Our principal paper, Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron, can be found in the University of Chicago Law Review, on the website of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center on Regulatory Policy, and on ssrn.com.) A core example of libertarian paternalism is Thaler's Save More Tomorrow plan, by which workers can sign up to devote some of their future wage increases to savings. Another example is the automatic enrollment plan, by which workers are automatically enrolled in a savings plan, but can opt out with no trouble and at no expense if they choose to do so. We could easily imagine a Give More Tomorrow plan, for charitable giving, or automatic enrollment for the same purpose (with costless opt-out).