The docket entry notice says the motion for reconsideration is denied "for the reasons stated in open court." This, surely, is waiver-- the plaintiff never claimed that the Virginia law of defamation should apply until he filed his motion for reconsideration.

The judge gave the defendants until Aug. 14 to respond to plaintiff's motion to amend his complaint.

The motion to amend seeks to revive the dismissed Count I (the Freakonomics complaint). It says it is based on "new information learned through discovery"-- why then, should this not have been brought up at the time of the original motion to dismiss Count I? That is, if it's even particularly helpful.

Lott's proposed amended complaint seems to rehash his allegation of per se defamation. Really, I don't know if a new complaint can add much to a per se charge; either the words of the book defamed him per se, or they didn't. I don't see how any "new evidence" of Levitt's alleged malice makes a whole lot of difference (either he really disliked him or he really, really, really disliked him).

The new "count" to be added, basically amounts to a specific allegation of various forms of harm Lott allegedly suffered. Again, this doesn't really seem like any new or newly discovered allegation of defamation; it sounds more like evidence of damage, which was known or should have been known to the plaintiff without any sort of discovery being done to the defendant.

I think Lott's new lawyers are being aggressive, but there just doesn't seem to be anything new here. I hope for their sake they are being paid by the hour- I doubt their motion has any chance at success. It seems like an attempt at reheating a lawsuit that's gone cold, without anything really new.

(By the way I take no position on Lott's scholarship- I am not familiar with it. Nor do I take a position on whether Levitt defamed him. I just think that any chance Lott has in this suit, comes from an appeal of the previous ruling to dismiss Count I, based on Illinois law; his attempts to use Va. law, or to amend his lawsuit, are going nowhere.)

From TFA:

"And for the first time in the litigation, Mr. Lott directly tackles the question of a national telephone survey that he allegedly conducted in 1997...In Freakonomics, Mr. Levitt obliquely refers to the dispute over the telephone survey. In the new motion, for the first time, Mr. Lott says that that passage’s innuendo is false and defamatory."

Note, however, that Lott is not offering any evidence that he actually conducted the survey - at least not yet. Will his legal team will offer any more evidence than baldface claims of "Levitt is spreading innuendo"? So far, the evidence that the survey ever took place is mighty thin...

Bellesiles at least had the decency to slink off quietly when he got caught making stuff up. Not so for John Lott.

Your claims are inaccurate and not investigated at the very least.

I read your side of the story when this brewed over a couple of years ago. I do not find it any more persuasive today than I did at the time. Unless you have something new to add, neither should anyone else.

I stand by my statement that the evidence of the survey is very thin. We have hard evidence of a computer crash, but no evidence of what data was lost. We have a guy who came out of the woodwork 5 years later who claims to have taken the survey, but he's not exactly a disinterested party. Other than that? Not much. In particular, there's no contemporaneous supporting documentation at all. Did it get lost when the computer crashed, or did you lose it in a flood? And when asked for names of the research assistants who collected the data, the best you can do is a Gonzalesesque "I don't recall."

Anyway, you're probably better off targeting your arguments to the judge rather than random guys on the internets. Unless you're planning to sue me too.

Bellesiles at least had the decency to slink off quietly when he got caught making stuff up.

This is not accurate. Bellesiles fought up a storm. From the time I first pointed out that some of his quotes were false, it was a couple of years before he "resigned." And he still hasn't admitted that he did anything wrong.

Also, if Lott's 1997 survey could not be replicated, you might wonder. But it was replicated in 2002, with similar results. Lott at least can demonstrate that the 1997 survey results could be replicated, that a lot of other people have contemporaneous memories of a hard disk crash that Lott suffered, and at least one person who seems to have been one of those surveyed in 1997. At this point, all you have is suspicion and doubt.

Well, at first you wrote "Lott is not offering any evidence" (emphasis added).

Right. I was commenting on the article. I didn't see any evidence in today's article. Did you?

And as for the "dog ate my homework" tall tale on your website, well, I'll let others read it and make their own conclusions. All I can say is that I've heard similar excuses from students and it makes me sad to hear a grown man doing it.

"Richard Aubrey (mail):
I think this is big regarding Levitt.

He claimed, publicly, that a piece of Lott's work had not been peer-reviewed, when, in fact, he had been one of the reviewers.

In academia, is this sort of thing important?

Seems to me, with a record like that, normal people wouldn't ask him the time of day without having a newly re-set watch on each wrist.

What, honestly, is any assertion of his going to be worth in the future?"
========================
I don't know what the standards are in the humanities,
but in the natural sciences he would have been judged,
by the editors, referees, and readers of the refereed journals, a dim-witted crook to be ignored in the future.
And should he ever decide to submit a paper to a
reputed journal, that paper would be politely returned
as no referee will agree to review it.
I've this happen for far less outrageous conduct,
simply for an extremely crazy paper (and, by implication,
the crazy author.)

He claimed, publicly, that a piece of Lott's work had not been peer-reviewed, when, in fact, he had been one of the reviewers.

Publicly? It was in a private email to a single person. It was later made public by the recipient.

That doesn't excuse the fibbing, of course. However, it appears Levitt is more careful with his public pronouncements than he is in private correspondence. If it turns out that his published work is untruthful, (for instance, if he cites a survey that doesn't exist) he should be a nobody. I'll support that as a standard - will you?

TDPerkins,

My conclusions on Lott's alleged 1997 survey are based primarily on Jim Lindgrin's report here.

They are not based on my "not liking the results" any more than my opinions of Belleisles is based on "not liking the results".

Academic dishonesty is academic dishonesty. Period.

And suing someone for pointing it out is beyond reprehensible.

My conclusions on Lott's alleged 1997 survey are based primarily on Jim Lindgrin's report here.

Which is out of date.

Academic dishonesty is academic dishonesty.

You have no evidence such dishonesty occurred, the sock puppetry conceded. The numerical validity of his work in not impeached.

And suing someone for pointing it out is beyond reprehensible.

Levitt did lie, and it is that act for which he was sued.

And yes, given the facts currently available, your statements show an untoward bias against Mr. Lott--that bias may well not be ideological, it may could easily merely be illogical.

Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp

I have commented on Lott's claims to have evidence for a survey here. The short version is that because he doesn't have any evidence to speak of that he conducted a survey, he keeps proving that he had a disk crash. Look at how many people who know that he had a disk crash. How come he can't provide anything from colleagues or students that he did a survey? Surveying thousands of people is a major operation. As well as the students that did the survey, there should also have been friends and family of those students that were told about the weeks spent conducting this survey. Yet despite wide publicity in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and in Freakonomics none of them can come forward.

Add to this the fact that Lott claimed that the survey took three months in 1997 to conduct and yet he was somehow in possesion of the result in early February 1997 (though he didn't say that it was from this survey until much later.) And the fact that it is mathematically impossible for him to get a 98% brandishing number from the survey he claimed to conduct.

Nor is true that he replicated the result in a 2002 survey. He did another survey in 2002 which got a different result. So he just asserted that the result was 95% brandishing. You don't have to take my word for this -- it's in a peer reviewed journal article.

So he just asserted that the result was 95% brandishing. You don't have to take my word for this -- it's in a peer reviewed journal article.

You have no credibility with me sir.

Yours, TDP, ml, msl, &pfpp

Proving that Lott had a disk crash does not prove that he did a survey. It isn't even evidence that he did a survey.

Lott has a new lawyer and he's trying to revive the bit that got thrown out.

TDP,

BTW, you say that Lindgrin's report is out of date. Is there some new evidence you'd like to point out?

If this is not new evidence, it is evidence you are ignoring.

I've read it. Lott proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he had a hard drive crash. Other than that, it's pretty thin.

Hard drive crashes don't make people and paperwork disappear into thin air. Other than two people who claim to have taken a similar survey around the time, there's nobody other than Lott with a recollection, and no contemporaneous paperwork. That's more than just suspicious.

I'm still at a loss to understand your "out of date" dismissal of Lindgrin. What evidence has surfaced since?

ME: Hard drive crashes don't make people and paperwork disappear into thin air.

TDP: BS. For example, as my employer's IT dept. is loathe to backup hard drives, were I to have a crash, I'd lose every email since 2005--a treasure trove of information. I have a private bkup of course.

????? Since a crash would destroy your emails, people and paperwork would disappear too? ????

To the best of my knowledge, this collated info was not avail. when Lindgren made his pronouncement WRT this affair which I am aware of.

Huh? "this collated info" Could you be specific?

Or am I being too "idiosyncratic" (whatever you mean by that)

Bellesiles at least had the decency to slink off quietly when he got caught making stuff up.
This is not accurate. Bellesiles fought up a storm.

True. It'd be much more accurate to say that the anti-gun folks were willing to abandon this guy when he turned out to be a liar, but the pro-gun crowd has no such scruples about Lott.

????? Since a crash would destroy your emails, people and paperwork would disappear too? ????
99.9% of it, I'm sure, would not be recalled by me or anyone else with enough clarity or certainty...

Perhaps this is being lost in translation. Would your hard drive crash destroy 1)things written on paper (eg pay stubs) or 2)people who had (albeit vague) recollection of events?

Finally, your repeated insistence that someone prove a negative is amusingly stupid.

Yours, CW, KMA &FOAD

I'm a little confused by the judgments on the "peer-refereed" / "peer-reviewed" item. (I've been on both sides of that process, although in computer science rather than economics; I haven't heard that it works differently in other subjects, but perhaps it does.) If you ask people why peer review matters, you'll hear that it tends to certify quality — not well, but better than not having peer review. If you ask them why it certifies quality, I believe you'll hear that the main item is rejection: at a good journal such as the one in question, the main function of a review panel is to reject a large majority of the papers (or grant applications, or whatever) as not good enough. It does have a secondary function of suggesting improvements.

The final lead editor of the issue in question says that

The acceptance rate for papers at The Journal of Law and Economics is something like 8 to 10 percent. This issue had something like ten papers and like most conference articles, none [I believe] were rejected.

Goolsbee's viewpoint would carry over into the sciences as I understand them (I'm always a bit dubious about economics as a science, but this does not make me think less of any of the parties involved, even Lott.) In other words, there were evidently people called "peer reviewers" and it seems that they did serve their editorial-suggestions function, but not their primary function. If any of the authors were tenure-track people, they should make sure that their eventual tenure committees understood that these papers should be counted as non-peer-reviewed, even though they had been published in a reputable journal which, as Levitt's correspondent had said, is "not chopped liver." As a casual response to that casual criterion-usage, Levitt's "not peer refereed" seems appropriate to me; he might just as truly (and falsely, when we come to literal truth) have said "but that issue _was_ chopped liver." I'm a vegetarian; I'll stay away from it.

Perhaps I should mention my own bias; I started as a gun-control advocate, or at least contributor to HCI, then was really annoyed by their misuse of data; got interested for a while, read various things, decided that their case was ludicrously weak; saw a summary of Lott's More Guns, Less Crime and thought "At last, something solid!" and ordered two copies, one to give a friend. But then I felt, umm, squeamish. The two copies are still in my basement, not worthless but not solid, and I'm now in the camp saying "there's no strong evidence of any strong effect either way, so we should not ban guns."

Tom Myers,

Perhaps I should mention my own bias; I started as a gun-control advocate, or at least contributor to HCI, then was really annoyed by their misuse of data; got interested for a while, read various things, decided that their case was ludicrously weak; saw a summary of Lott's More Guns, Less Crime and thought "At last, something solid!" and ordered two copies, one to give a friend. But then I felt, umm, squeamish. The two copies are still in my basement, not worthless but not solid, and I'm now in the camp saying "there's no strong evidence of any strong effect either way, so we should not ban guns."

Which is fair enough, and probably correct.

I do think a lot of pro-Lott people assume that the reason people attack him is because he is pro-gun (and by implication they are anti), rather than the other reasons discussed above and elsewhere.

TDPerk,

As many have said, there is evidence of a hard disk crash. There is a great deal less evidence for the survey having been done, and indeed the varied sources from Lott of where the he obtained the 98% figure tend to suggest that it wasnt done, as does the fact that, despite this being (to a degree) nationally reported and resulting in legal action, none of those students who allegedly carried out the survey have come forward.