A commenter writes: “In the context of refereed economics journals, ‘replicate’ has one meaning only: The use of an author’s data and model to ensure that falsification of findings is not an issue.” Is this…

I appear to have been too generous to Lott’s complaint when I first criticized it. William Ford, a Bigelow teacher at University of Chicago Law, has posted a devastating two-part analysis (via Wright) of the…

Deoxy, Levitt can make a very strong case that 1 he didn’t accuse Lott of fraud and 2 that in any case Lott is guilty of fraud.

And there’s the difference. Lott has put up with this crap for years, and the truth has not won out.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a good choice, but he didn’t resort to this quickly: how many years has he been putting up with this crap?

But some of the points you make would chang my weighting of the options. Not being able to use the first trial’s results in the second, for instance… let’s say I notified someone that the claims about me they had made in the past were shown to be libelous in a court of law, and I warned them that if they repeated said claims, I would take legal action against them. Even then, such a previous suit is non-admissable?

The only thing we could do by suing is to harass an individual defendant. Our suing doesn’t prevent other people from mentioning the false claim; even our winning doesn’t prevent other people from repeating the false claim, because we don’t get to use the first trial’s results in the second trial.

Meanwhile, Lott will spend a substantial part of the next few years dealing with attorneys instead of with research, research that would do more to improve his standing than any successful court determination could. (It’s far from clear to me that Lott could get the determination he seeks; while the email libel is cut-and-dried, the damages there are nominal, and Levitt has a decent argument that Lott’s definition of “replicate” is narrower than is commonly understood.) And Lott’s enemies have to be salivating over the possibility of deposing Lott on a variety of controversial issues that are relevant to the question of his academic reputation.

Exmaple(a bit over simplified and taking Lott’s perspective, just to make the point): Let’s say that a group of lawyers decide they don’t have any good answers to the questions raised by your site, but they still want to shut you down. Everytime you come up (or some question comes up which sounds like something you might have inspired), they say that you’re just a paid PR opperation for big insurance companies, and that you made stuff up for your site. And the media begins carrying that as well. That becomes your standard moniker. You can claim all you want (with whateverproof you want) that you aren’t employed by inurance companies, etc, etc, but that is still how you are described publicly by the majority of people. It have become “common knowledge”.

What would you do in that example? If that particular slander against you isn’t compelling, I’m sure you’re able to replace it with one that is.

The only legal recourse you have in such a situation is a lawsuit, sad as that may be. And, hopefully, you would only have to sue one or two people, assuming you won, as a clear judgement handed down on the issue (“Saying that Ted is making stuff up for his web site is untrue and libelous.”) would pretty well make future statements of that fact (espcially if you take th time to INFORM certain people of said judgment) very legally precarious.

In other words, this is the only way to get the truth out sometimes. Pathetic, yes. A lousy solution? Yes. But th only one I know of.

Now, that’s all assuming that Lott is on th up-and-up, which I don’t know for sure. I’m just judging by the responses of his critics, which (in my limited experience) is basically ad hominem and/or outright lies.

It’s also hard for me to imagine a scenario, win or lose, where John Lott wakes up on April 10, 2009, and says to himself “I’m better off because I brought this lawsuit three years ago.” At best it’s Pyrrhic, and at worst, it’s affirmatively self-destructive.