Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Cato Institute’

Keep Cato independent

Last week it looked as if the Koch v. Cato lawsuit, which directly affects me as a Cato senior fellow, was going to be something I’d need to refrain from discussing lest I endanger the institute’s legal interests. But now Cato has now itself gone public with a Save Cato page laying out the case for its continued independence.

If you haven’t yet caught up with the furor, some places to start are (besides the earlier-linked Jonathan Adler, Don Boudreaux and Steve Chapman) David Boaz, the Charles Koch Foundation’s side, Alison Frankel/Reuters, Marie Gryphon, Trevor Burrus, Brink Lindsay, and Julian Sanchez. Among those who disagree with Cato’s point of view but value its independence are Ezra Klein, the Boston Globe, and numerous others.

I was a source for Katy Waldman’s Slate “Explainer” today on how think tanks work. Last fall I wrote an appreciation of the wonderful Bill Niskanen, who served for so long as Cato’s chairman.

I’ll soon have set up a page on the controversy, to be updated with new links. In the mean time there’s a Facebook group, and an account and hashtag on Twitter.

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Koch v. Cato

As some readers will have heard, the Cato Institute, with which I’m affiliated, is the subject of a lawsuit filed last week over its governance structure. Given the legal ramifications I don’t expect to employ this space to express opinions about the case while it’s pending, but for those who are interested, it’s being widely discussed elsewhere on the web, including by many writers often quoted in these columns, such as — to go no further than the ABCs — Jonathan Adler, Don Boudreaux, and Steve Chapman.

For similar reasons, this post unlike most will be closed to reader comments.

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“The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls”

A new study by James Bessen, Jennifer Ford and Michael J. Meurer in Cato’s Regulation magazine:

This article makes several findings about this litigation [patent litigation by non-practicing entities (NPEs)]. First, by observing what happens to a defendant’s stock price around the filing of a patent lawsuit, we are able to assess the effect of the lawsuit on the firm’s wealth, after taking into account general market trends and random factors affecting the individual stock. We find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010. During the last four years, the lost wealth has averaged over $80 billion per year. These defendants are mostly technology companies that invest heavily in R&D. To the extent that this litigation represents an unavoidable business cost to technology developers, it reduces the profits that these firms make on their technology investments. That is, these lawsuits substantially reduce their incentives to innovate.

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Remembering Bill Niskanen, 1933-2011

The distinguished economist, who served the Cato Institute as its longtime chairman, was famous for his integrity, collegiality, and far-ranging scholarly interests, and in particular for his pathbreaking work in the field of “public choice” economics [Cato bio and announcement; NYT obituary]. His departure from Ford Motor’s chief economist post after declining to back the company’s push for auto import quotas came to symbolize an honesty and adherence to principle that set a sorely needed example in Washington. An expert on the economics of defense spending and professor at UCLA and Berkeley, he was later an architect of the Reagan economic program as a member of that president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Throughout his career, his personal warmth, approachability and unquenchable curiosity about the world made him an inspiration and mentor to generations of scholars. Some tributes: Lew Uhler, Ben Zycher, David Henderson, Randal O’Toole, Ian Vasquez, Fred Smith, Nick Gillespie, Stephen Moore, John Samples (audio podcast), William Poole. Bureaucracy and Representative Government, Niskanen’s pioneering public choice analysis of the incentives facing government agencies, appeared in 1971; a more recent essay collection, Reflections of a Political Economist, explores a range of current controversies in that and other areas.

Both before and since joining Cato in 2010, I had many chances to converse with Bill and get to know his enormous range of interests, extraordinary self-command, soft-spokenness and lack of pretense, and understated humor. Often, after hearing what I was working on, he would wait for a quiet moment to ask whether I was familiar with thus-and-such a scholarly paper that had appeared some while back. He then would summarize the paper’s findings, which typically would neither reinforce nor contradict the particular point I was pursuing, but instead approached the material from some entirely different perspective or pointed up an unexpected connection to what had seemed an unrelated set of issues. This is what graduate school is supposed to be like, I would think — and it was why, when the news came last week, I recalled what is said to be an African proverb: when a wise man dies, it is as if a library has burned down.

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Libertarians and medical malpractice

What kind of medical liability market would emerge if courts decided to begin upholding freedom of contract? I take up that question — and explain some of my misgivings about efforts to portray today’s medical malpractice sector as somehow a free-market arrangement — at Cato at Liberty (& welcome Elie Mystal/Above the Law, GruntDoc, Ramesh Ponnuru readers).

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Just out: Cato Supreme Court Review, 2010-2011

It’s a modest $15 for the softcover and just $5.99 for the e-edition. As I said while singing its praises at Constitution Day recently, it’s distinguished from conventional law reviews not only by its Madisonian point of view, and by its extreme speediness (published only three or so months after the conclusion of the Court’s last term) but also by its unusual readability and style, pitched to intelligent readers whether or not they are specialists in the law. You can buy it here.

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Constitutional law roundup

Cato-intensive edition:

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Live stream tomorrow morning: Supreme Court briefing

Tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern I’ll be appearing at a Cato Institute “Liberty Briefing” for invited journalists and others to preview the Institute’s Constitution Day, which is Thursday, and to talk in particular about the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to issues of civil litigation, including this year’s Wal-Mart v. Dukes case. My Cato colleague Trevor Burrus will be discussing court challenges to ObamaCare and its individual mandate, a topic likely to reach the high court before long. You can watch live online here.

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