Unbelievable!

by John Q on January 25, 2006

In every sense of the term.

The NYT runs an Op-ed Piece by John Lott, reporting statistical work he claims to have undertaken.

(Only too believable section). Lott’s results support current Republican talking points.

(Via Tim Lambert and Kevin Drum)

{ 5 comments }

1

joe o 01.25.06 at 7:51 pm

Many of the measurements of quality that Lott uses, such as Law Review and the Choi Gulati index, reward ideological extremism.

The Choi-Gulati index in particular is a measure of number of opinions written, cites in other districts and “independence”. If you write out of the mainstream dissents, you tend to score high on the “independence” portion of the Choi-Gulati index, without the ABA neccessarily looking favorably at you.

Out of district cites, and possibly productivity, also favour ideological judges. Other judges will have a lot of mainstream judges to cite over a longer period of time, but fewer ideological judges to cite. Ideological, or ideosyncratic, judges will also tend to write a lot of opinions since their differences with their peer judges is greater. If you are a judge in the mainstream you can be pretty confortable that an opinion written by a fellow judge will be close to your general viewpoint, ideological judges can’t be so sure, so they will tend to write more opinions.

2

John Isbell 01.25.06 at 8:32 pm

Maybe Mary Rosh is working for the Times these days.

3

will u. 01.25.06 at 8:51 pm

Adding insult to TimesSelect injury..

4

Barry Freed 01.25.06 at 10:42 pm

Maybe Mary Rosh is working for the Times these days.

Word is she’s filling Judy Miller’s Manolo Blahnik’s these days.

5

paul 01.26.06 at 11:40 am

I wonder how many letters the Times has gotten from her praising Lott’s work. I wonder if they’ll accidentally publish one.

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