Lott v. Levitt: Quick Update III

I went to Vancouver last week for the AALS workshop on intellectual property and fell behind on the latest developments in the dispute between Lott and Levitt. Nothing has happened in court since my last update -- I just checked the docket report on Pacer -- but here is the news from outside of court:

1. Last Monday, the Los Angeles Times published a response by John Lott to Jon Weiner’s op-ed piece. As far as I know, this letter contains Lott’s first public comment on the lawsuit.

2. The next day, James Lindgren (Northwestern) weighed in on the lawsuit on the Volokh Conspiracy. Unlike Lott’s complaint, Lindgren focuses on the context of the allegedly defamatory statement in Freakonomics, emphasizing that it is made right after raising questions about another one of Lott’s studies, a 1997 telephone survey. The question about the telephone survey is whether Lott actually conducted it. The statement about the failure to replicate Lott’s results involves a different study, and no one doubts that Lott conducted this one. Lindgren worries, however, that the juxtaposition of the comments about the two studies is misleading, perhaps suggesting that Lott did not conduct either one of them. But he still predicts the lawsuit will be unsuccessful.

3. Tim Lambert responded to Lindgren’s comments here. Lambert also discusses Lott’s evidence that he conducted the 1997 telephone survey.

Comments

[William Ford]

Thanks for noting the problem with the link. Since I have the registration cookie stored, I did not catch this problem. I just updated the link in the post to the one you suggested.

Lott has also posted the letter on his own website here: http://johnrlott.tripod.com/2006/06/la-times-letter-to-editor-re-shooting.html

[Jeffrey Segal]

The link to the John Lott response required free registration at the LA Times, so I next tried Lexis, but couldn't find it there either. It is available, though, on the LA Times's web site. Click on Opinion, then Letters, and then scroll down to June 12.