The Age of Erotic Capital? Legal Protection for the Ugly?

over a lifetime and assuming today’s mean wages, a handsome worker in America might on average make $230,000 more than a very plain one.

The Economist reviews three books on beauty;
Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful. By Daniel Hamermesh
The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. By Deborah Rhode
Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. By Catherine Hakim

We of course recommend Hamermesh!

Chapter 8. Legal Protection for the Ugly
Fairness and Public Policy
What Kinds of Protection Are Possible?
How Have Existing Policies Been Used?
Is It Possible to Protect the Ugly?
What Justifies Protecting the Ugly?
What Justifies Not Protecting the Ugly?
What Is an Appropriate Policy?
Protecting the Ugly in the Near Future

John Grisham, the failed tax lawyer and construction worker

Effective Habits from John Grisham-

Halfway through college, and still drifting, I decided to become a high-powered tax lawyer. The plan was sailing along until I took my first course in tax law. I was stunned by its complexity and lunacy, and I barely passed the course...

When my law office started to struggle for lack of well-paying work — indigent cases are far from lucrative — I decided to go into yet another low-paying career: in 1983, I was elected to a House seat in the Mississippi State Legislature. The salary was $8,000, which was more than I made during my first year as a lawyer. Each year from January through March I was at the State Capitol in Jackson, wasting serious time, but also listening to great storytellers. I took a lot of notes, not knowing why but feeling that, someday, those tales would come in handy...

Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn’t sure how to start. Over the following weeks I refined my plot outline and fleshed out my characters. One night I wrote “Chapter One” at the top of the first page of a legal pad; the novel, “A Time to Kill,” was finished three years later.

The book didn’t sell, and I stuck with my day job, defending criminals, preparing wills and deeds and contracts. Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort. It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing’s still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it.

Assorted

Letter from Birmingham Jail

The Origin of Singaporean Crime Policy

How Much Should Judges Make?

Chief Justice Roberts, in his report on the state of the judiciary at the end of 2006, cited a few kinds of data to support his argument that low pay is leading to a crisis. One was that 38 judges left the federal bench between 2000 and 2005, some citing the need to make more money.

Judge Richard A. Posner, a prominent federal appeals court judge in Chicago, called this “crying wolf” in his recent book, “How Judges Think.” The chief justice had lumped retirements and resignations together, Judge Posner said. Only 12 federal judges had resigned out of a total of 1,200 active and senior judges in the years in question, a small number in absolute terms and a smaller percentage than in the six years ending in 1974.

Judge Posner did not dispute that low pay may mean that there are fewer judges coming from private firms, but he did not see why that should matter so long as there appear to be plenty of qualified candidates.

Yes we can, Mr Geithner

David Friedman at Google

Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World

Singapore debate legalising organ trading

Ownership Congestion? Tragedy of Anticommons?

A former World Banker;

Well, I’ve been finding ownership puzzles in a host of disparate places, like waiting around in airports and wondering why we don’t build more runways. Just 25 new runways at our busiest airports would solve most air travel delays. Why don’t we build them? In Europe, for instance, I started thinking about why cell phones work so much better there than here. The answer, in part, is that over 90 percent of our prime spectrum is dead air. Talking to research scientists I asked why we have so many pharmaceutical patents today but so few new drugs that actually help people. My students clued me in to another puzzle: why has African-American farm ownership dropped 98 percent in the last century? And why are so many old television shows, like China Beach and WKRP in Cincinnati, still not available on DVD? Turns out, all of these problems are really the same problem. Private ownership usually creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect – it creates gridlock. Once people see this free market paradox, once we have a shared language for gridlock, we can begin to talk about it and then to fix it...

A drug company executive tells me he may have a better Alzheimer’s treatment. But to get FDA approval and bring it to market, he has to license dozens and dozens of patents relevant to testing for safety and side effects. So negotiations fail and the Alzheimer’s drug sits on a shelf, even though my informant is confident it could save countless lives and earn billions of dollars.

Very few people or organizations are speaking out against this – against the underuse of property rights. Whom do you lobby for drugs that don’t yet exist or for cures that people can’t yet see? Gridlock, that is, resource underuse, is invisible in comparison with overuse – everyone can see the dramatic results of fisheries being depleted or air being polluted. But with wasteful underuse, the effects are almost always hidden. So when drugs, wireless services, DVDs, and runways go missing, we don’t really have champions ready to set it right. The flip side of gridlock is that it’s one of the great entrepreneurial and political opportunities of our era....

The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives, Michael Heller

Related;
The legal framework for private sector development in a transitional economy : the case of Poland

The Liberal Commons

Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research

Eminent Domain and the New York Times

Symmetric Tragedies: Commons and Anticommons
James M. Buchanan and Yong J. Yoon

Blaming Monica Goodling

Qualification to be a president- skill at giving exams?

Akhil Reed Amar writes;

Barack Obama’s exam questions and answers engaged me on several levels.

First, As a constitutional law professor, I came away impressed — dazzled, really — by the analytic intelligence and sophistication of these questions and answers. A really good exam — an exam that tests and stretches the student, while simultaneously providing the professor with a handy and fair index to rank the class — is its own special art form. Composing such an exam is like crafting a sonnet or a crossword puzzle. We don’t have Obama’s answer key every year; but the questions themselves are in many instances beautifully constructed to enable students to explore the seams and plumb the depths of the Supreme Court’s case law. I am tempted to use variations of several of these questions myself in some future exam. (I won’t say which, lest I tip my students off.) When I read Jodi Kantor’s piece, I was very interested to hear that the University of Chicago Law School was willing to offer Obama tenure. In these materials I see why.

Second, as a student of history, I couldn’t help thinking of Lincoln. Not just because we have a skinny guy from Illinois who is largely self-made and who can write a great speech — I knew that already. Lincoln was a brilliant lawyer, who did his own thinking and writing and cut to the essence of hard legal issues with amazing incisiveness. Lincoln understood the Constitution and its deepest structures as well as or better than any of the Justices on the Supreme Court of his day. These materials helped me see Obama in a similar light.

Which brings me to the last level — the moral level. Like Lincoln, Jefferson and Madison were also brilliant. But Jefferson and Madison lived and died as slaveholders and did much less than they could have done to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction. Nixon had a keen legal mind, but a large moral blind spot. Lincoln had a rare combination of moral depth and legal brilliance. Make no mistake, he was a politician who understood how to tack and trim. But he was a politician with a strong moral compass and a deep understanding of the rule of law. Similarly, there is a great deal of moral seriousness in Obama’s legal materials. They are not just about technical and technocratic legal questions. Some of the great mysteries and tragedies of human life and American society — involving marriage, divorce, childbearing, cloning, the right to die with dignity, infertility, sexual orientation, and yes, of course, race — are probed in these materials in ways that encourage students to think not just about law, but about justice, and truth, and morality.

Source: The Caucus Blog

More Monica Goodling

Your Congress at Work

God, Guns + Gays- hiring score for US Attorneys

Gonzales Aides Broke Laws in Hiring, Report Concludes

A longtime prosecutor who drew rave reviews from his supervisors was passed over for an important counterterrorism slot because his wife was active in Democratic politics, and a much-less-experienced lawyer with Republican leanings got the job, the report said.

Another prosecutor was rejected for a job in part because she was thought to be a lesbian. And a Republican lawyer got high marks at his job interview because he was found to be sufficiently conservative on the core issues of “god, guns + gays.”

The report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general and its internal ethics office, centered on the misconduct of a small circle of aides to Mr. Gonzales, including Monica Goodling, a former top adviser to the attorney general, and Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff. It also found that White House officials were actively involved in some hiring decisions.

My Guantánamo Diary

My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me
by Mahvish Khan

Debate of the Day

A Historian, a Lawyer, and the Heller Decision

How do you define a terrorist?

Canada : Security Certificates - Time for Reform

Richard Thaler on Nudge

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Related;
Dustin Hoffman’s mental accounting

Google goes against Burmese junta

Global Justice Center

Burma is a criminal cabal.

Your Lawmakers at Work

The Same Old Song on High Gas Prices;

In one of the more pointed exchanges, Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, seized on the record $40.6 billion profit of Exxon Mobil in 2007. She pounded on the company’s senior vice president, J. Stephen Simon, demanding to know if gas prices would be lower if the company earned a few billion dollars less.

At another point, Ms. Waters brazenly suggested that perhaps the American oil industry should be nationalized, acknowledging that it was an “extreme step” but one that might be necessary if outsize profits and exorbitant gasoline prices continued.

“Thank you for being here today,” Ms. Waters told the executives. “If you feel a little bit beaten up on, we all feel beaten up on, so just share the pain. We get our behinds kicked every day in our districts about what is going on.”

Policy Talks at Google

Condoleezza Rice & David Miliband


Robert Atkinson, Edwin Garrubbo, Michael Avon, and Google Chief Economist Hal Varian

Happy Polygamists

None of the State's Business

Classic BBC Comedy

The News Quiz;

The emergency budget, see-through folders and Cherie's memoirs...

Press cuttings;

Police reveal that a woman arrested for shoplifting had a whole salami in her knickers. When asked why, she said it was because she was missing her Italian boyfriend. (Reuters via The Manchester Evenings News)

Irish police are being handicapped in a search for a stolen van, because they cannot issue a description. It's a special branch vehicle, and they don't want the public to know what it looks like. (The Guardian)

After being charged £20 for a £10 overdraft, 30 year old Michael Howard of Leeds changed his name by deed poll to Yorkshire Bank PLC Are Fascist Bastards. The bank has now asked him to close his account, and Mr. Bastards has asked them to repay the 69p balance, by cheque, made out in his new name. (The Guardian)

Would the congregation please note that the bowl at the back of the church labelled 'for the sick' is for monetary donations only. (Churchtown Parish Magazine)

6.10pm: Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bennett's estranged cousin, Mr.Collins, writes to announce his imminent visit to Longbourne - the house he will inherit on Mr.Bennett's death. Mrs. Bennett rallies the residents to stop him setting up a minicab service. (Hampstead and Highgate Express)

There must, for instance, be something very strange in a man who , if left a lone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn't try it on. (Glasgow Evening News)

A young girl who was blown out to sea on a set of inflatable teeth was rescued by a man on an inflatable lobster. A coastguard spokesman commented, "this sort of thing is all too common". (The Times)

At the height of the gale, the harbourmaster radioed a coastguard on the spot and asked him to estimate the wind speed. He replied that he was sorry, but he didn't have a gauge. However, if it was any help, the wind had just blown his Land Rover off the cliff. (Aberdeen Evening Express)

Mrs Irene Graham of Thorpe Avenue, Boscombe, delighted the audience with her reminiscence of the German prisoner of war who was sent each week to do her garden. He was repatriated at the end of 1945, she recalled. "He'd always seemed a nice friendly chap, but when the crocuses came up in the middle of our lawn in February 1946, they spelt out Heil Hitler". (Bournemouth Evening Echo)

Commenting on a complaint from a Mr.Arthur Purdey about a large gas bill, a spokesman for North West gas said "We agree it was rather high for the time of year. It's possible Mr.Purdey has been charged for the gas used up during the explosion that blew his house to pieces." (Bangkok Post)