Author Archive | Stuart Benjamin

You can look at the electoral maps for all previous presidential elections at sites like this and this. The electoral map that bears the closest resemblance to the predictions for 2008 is 1896. And it is a pretty close resemblance. There is one small difference, though: the parties have flipped. The core of the Democratic […]

I generally don’t post my scholarship on this blog, but this essay is a bit different — short (12 pages) and (I hope) modestly amusing while trying to make a serious point. So, with apologies for the shameless self-promotion, here is an essay entitled Roasting the Pig to Burn the House: A Modest Proposal, and […]

A number of newspapers noted that the major stock market indices closed at their lowest levels since 2004. What I think is more remarkable is what this means for 10-year trailing returns. As of yesterday’s close, the S&P 500 increased by a paltry 6.25% over the last 10 years — roughly a .45% return per […]

Yesterday’s Detroit Free Press and today’s Raleigh News & Observer ran an op-ed by Mitu Gulati and me on the desirability of Obama and McCain telling us who they would choose to be their Secretary of the Treasury. This is closely related to our article on presidential candidates naming their key people in advance of […]

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Keith Poole is a major figure among political scientists, having gathered data on every significant congressional vote since time immemorial and analyzed those voting patterns. I just realized that he has put a ton of data and analysis online. It’s fasacinating stuff. Here are his data on polarization (note that party polarization is at its […]

Yesterday Eugene was kind enough both to post a link to an essay with Mitu Gulati that I just posted and to make thoughtful comments on it. I appreciate both the posting and the comments – a big part of the fun of being an academic (or blogger) is discussing the merits and demerits of […]

Maybe GM’s woes shouldn’t surprise anyone, but I find it remarkable that not only is GM’s stock trading at a 34-year low, but also that its market capitalization is $5.65 billion. That is less than 4% of Toyota’s market capitalization of of $144 billion. This is particularly striking given GM’s enormous size and still-significant market […]

That’s the title of a paper that Royce de Rohan Barondes has posted on SSRN. Here’s the abstract: This paper analyzes the relationship between the law schools attended by non-permanent judicial clerks and the frequencies of two adverse signals assigned by Shepard’s to their judges’ opinions: either a negative (warning) signal (roughly equivalent to reversal) […]

I will make two predictions: 1) Few lawyers who have expertise in the areas covered by the recently released Yoo Memorandum (part I here, part II here) will defend it as sound and persuasive legal analysis; 2) No more than a handful of such lawyers will agree with John Yoo’s characterization of the memo as […]

Andrew Olmsted, who blogged at Obsidian Wings, was killed yesterday in Iraq, where he was serving in the military. Months ago he composed a post to be published in case he died. It’s here, and it’s heartbreaking. There may be other notes that people serving in Iraq wrote to be read in case they died, […]

The New York Times has posted the latest data on contributions to Presidential campaigns here. Among other ways of slicing up this information, you can click on a candidate’s name and see a map showing the size of contributions from different cities/states that each has received through the third quarter. For almost all the candidates, […]

I noted two days ago that one possible explanation for the actions of at least some of those who apparently pressured* Michael Drake to rescind the offer to Erwin Chemerinsky was a desire to derail the new law school. As the LA Times article quoted below notes (Hat tip to Brian Leiter), a delay in […]

UC Irvine’s decision to rescind its offer to Erwin Chemerinsky (who, I should note, is a colleague and friend) is so outrageous and boneheaded that I can muster only three explanations: 1) Incompetence: This one is obvious. Erwin’s views are well known. Any remotely competent administrator should have vetted any fears about his ideology before […]

In addition to the big school cases that were decided today, the Supreme Court also decided an antitrust case, Leegin v. PSKS. In Leegin, the Court overruled a 1911 case (Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. John D. Park & Sons Co., for those of you scoring at home) to find that vertical price restraints should […]