This afternoon, sitting in the law school lounge, I noticed something on the closed captioning say "Johnnie Cochran is Dead". I thought-- that can't be the Johnnie Cochran, can it? I remembered a time (many many years ago) that I was walking home and saw a man running through the street yelling "Ronald Reagan is Dead!" (he wasn't). But I decided to check when I got to the YLPR meeting, and there was no sign of his death on CNN, so I assumed I had missed something, or the closed captioning had been unusually garbled.

Apparently, I was right the first time.

My First Amendment Professor, on Minneapolis Star Tribune v Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue:

The typical thing about a Rehnquist opinion, is that he will take a draft from a clerk, and take out every sentence that gives a reason.

Despite his conservative temperament, Rehnquist was never unduly preoccupied with following judicial precedents. In a biting critique published in The New Republic in 1982, Charles Krauthammer, the conservative essayist, and Owen Fiss, a liberal scholar at Yale Law School, charged that Rehnquist "repudiates precedents frequently and openly, and if that is impossible (because the precedent represents a tradition that neither the Court nor society is prepared to abandon), then he distorts them." Perhaps one answer to this criticism is that Rehnquist was always focused on moving the law in a fundamentally conservative direction while trying to circumvent any potential roadblocks along the way. His clerks, past and present, report that he would simply remove the reasoning from opinions if it got in the way of the result.

There are very few things in this world that make me regret going to law school rather than doing something else. Not quantum game theory, not the poetry of Brad Leithauser, not theories of self-translation, not even, quite, reading Czeslaw Milosz. However, reading stuff by Steven Levitt, namely his forthcoming co-written book Freakonomics still reminds me of how much closer and satisfying certain economic truths can be than certain legal ones.

[A moment for full disclosure: I have a copy of this book because the publishers asked me to review it in this space-- this didn't influence my opinion of the book, though. If I had hated it, I would be saying so here. I didn't even think to demand a kickback (other than a copy of the book), although the blog will receive a tiny credit on Amazon if you buy it at the link below. Also, I took Levitt's signature course on the Economics of Crime in the Spring of 2002; I received an A-, because I flubbed one final exam question, about how one might use carrots rather than sticks to control crime. I made the dimwitted suggestion that we could offer $10,000 to every man who makes it past the age of 25 without commiting a major crime. In retrospect, I should have suggested the Brazilian bounty-hunting model for corrupt cops, where police officers who rat out other corrupt officers receive huge sums of money, enough to compensate for the "you'll never work again in this town" effect.]

Anyway, this brings us to Freakonomics, co-written by Levitt and one Stephen Dubner (the author of his NYT profile from a few months back). As Stuart Buck points out, the book is written in Dubner's voice rather than Levitt's, but this isn't particularly bothersome.

The only complaint I do have against the book is that it is a little basic-- a few too many pages spent at the beginning rehashing the notion of deterrence and other hobbyhorses, and for people who have already read most of Levitt's work, there will be fewer surprises, since much of the book rehashes his research rather than describing the sordid secrets of his childhood upbringing. Well, I guess I also don't like the book's title, which is memorable but silly.

So, that said, what's good about the book? Everything else. Levitt's research (how to catch cheating high school teachers, how to catch cheating sumo wrestlers, whether the death penalty or legalized abortion did more to reduce crime in the '90s, why drug dealers are poor) is all interesting and all persuasive, and all entertaining. If more economists were like Steven Levitt (alas, most aren't) I probably would have tried to be one too.

The end of the book also goes into Levitt's work with up-and-coming economist Ronald Fryer (also recently profiled by Dubner in the Times), which includes the causes and consequences of black names. I wonder if there will be another book soon.

So anyway, this book belongs in the category of David Friedman's Hidden Order and Steven Landsburg's Fair Play-- easy to read but fascinating books on microeconomics for laymen-- but it is much better than either one, because (with all due respect to Landsburg and Friedman) Levitt is a much better economist.

[N.B. For those who are searching for more Levitt, he (along with Gary Becker, Crescat guest-blogger Doug Lichtman, and several others) has an amicus brief (PDF) in the upcoming Grokster case. Oh, and this is also my 15th book for the 50 Book Challenge.]