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San Jose Inside – ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann was quoted by San Jose Inside in a story about a new law in San Jose, California, requiring firearms owners to purchase liability insurance. You can read full piece here.

A month ago, National Public Radio’s “On Point,” hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti with WBUR, Boston, dealt specifically with that question. Liccardo was one of three guest panelists, along with journalist Jennifer Mascia and R.J. Lehmann, senior fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics.

“Insurance in and of itself is never going to cover the kinds of violent events that people imagine it would, because insurance can’t cover things that you do on purpose,” said Lehmann.

The San Jose ordinance, according to Lehmann, ”would not cover the overwhelming majority of firearms incidents that tend to be the subject of public concern.”

“The paradigmatic example of a tragic firearms accident—a child gets hold of an unsecured firearm and injures his or her sibling—would not be covered,” he said. “More importantly, coverage would not extend to intentional acts.”

JOTWELL – ICLE Academic Affiliate Keith Hylton’s paper “Waivers” was reviewed by David Hoffman in the online journal JOTWELL. You can read full piece here.

There is nothing more worth celebrating than articles you learn from even when you think they are wrong from soup to nuts. Keith Hylton’s new draft, Waivers, is that kind of piece for me. In the paper, Professor Hylton considers waivers, which as Professor Bob Hillman once described, are “crazy stuff.” They aren’t necessarily contracts and need no consideration; they extinguish legal rights with the lightest of touches, but can be retracted just as easily, except when they can’t; and they are subject to a policing regime that varies considerably between states and across time. Is waiver x enforceable can be one of the most difficult questions for contract and tort jurists to answer. And yet, as the Waiver Society Project has illustrated, waivers are increasingly ubiquitous. We need clear thinking about this phenomenon, and Waivers is therefore a paper I like lots, even though I reject its premises, analysis and conclusion.

Mirage News – ICLE Academic Affiliate Bernard Black was quoted by Mirage News in a story about his recent co-authored paper on whether past medical malpractice claims are predictive of future claims. You can read full piece here.

“This study shows that even one paid malpractice claim roughly quadruples the likelihood that a physician will face another paid claim in the future. Predictive power increases with the number of paid claims,” said Bernard Black, one of the study’s authors and a professor of law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law who specializes in health policy research.

Thus, according to Black, physicians with even a single paid claim – and certainly those with two or more claims – could benefit from graduated intervention, such as training and greater oversight, that could reduce future claims and patient harm.

U.S. News & World Report – ICLE Academic Affiliate Bernard Black was quoted by U.S. News & World Report in a story about his recent co-authored paper on the benefits of COVID-19 vaccine boosters by age cohort. You can read full piece here.

Still, for younger people the booster may be of less benefit, he suggested.

Fortune – ICLE Academic Affiliate Peter Klein was quoted by Fortune in a story about his recent co-authored paper on whether past medical malpractice claims are predictive of future claims. You can read full piece here.

“We suggest that going woke is an emergent strategy that is largely shaped by middle managers,” wrote Nicolai Foss, a strategy professor at Copenhagen Business School, and Peter Klein, an entrepreneurship and corporate innovation professor at Baylor University. “Wokeness arises from middle managers and support personnel using their delegated responsibility and specialist status to engage in woke internal advocacy, which may increase their influence and job security.”

…Foss and Klein argue that despite the rise of woke ideologies in companies, there is “little evidence of systematic support for woke ideas” in the population or among top executives. They did not provide any data backing this view.

“And going woke does not appear to improve company performance,” they wrote, adding that it does, however, “provide authority, job security, and career opportunities” for middle managers.

…Foss and Klein also warned that labor and hiring costs may increase owing to conflict between workers in a woke environment, noting that some top execs, including Brian Armstrong, CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, have decided to ban political discussions at the workplace because of rising conflict among his workers.

“When companies go woke, they risk increasing these internal costs of organization,” they wrote.

…The study’s authors pointed to rising spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs as an example of other rising costs associated with a woke corporate stance. U.S. companies spent $9.3 billion on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in 2022, and by 2026, that number is projected to rise to $15.4 billion, according to data from consulting firm StrategyR.

…But Foss and Klein argue companies that adopt woke practices could fall into a “purity spiral,” where employees compete to be considered “the purest proponent of the group’s essential values.”

“This leads to frequently changing internal agendas as the internal bar of moral righteousness is constantly being raised in a game of purer than thou,” they wrote.

The study authors added that the emergence of woke culture “remains poorly understood,” and urged more researchers to investigate the phenomenon.

ClimateWire – ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann was quoted by ClimateWire in a story about the prospects for a long-term reauthorization of the National Flood Insurance Program in the 118th Congress. You can read full piece here.

“One reason there hasn’t been movement is there hasn’t been anything to force it,” said R.J. Lehmann, an expert on flood insurance at the International Center for Law & Economics. “There’s no reason to have votes that expose members to things they don’t want to vote on.”

Lehmann said that with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats controlling the Senate, lawmakers could be forced to scale back their ambitions for overhauling the NFIP.

“It may be the constraints of having the two chambers controlled by different parties make that a starting point,” Lehmann said.

 

TrustNodes – ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepel was quoted by TrustNodes in a story about his recent paper on conflicts between Web2 platforms and emerging Web3 business models. You can read full piece here.

“Web3 depends on Web2, which creates conditions for the co-evolution of these two ecosystems and raises opportunities for anti-competitive strategies,” says Thibault Schrepel, an Associate Professor of Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

In pointing out that the value of Web2 and Web3 is “too distinct to overlap entirely,” they will both survive, Schrepel says, if one is not driven out by current tech giants.

Americans for Tax Reform – An International Center for Law & Economics report was cited by Americans for Tax Reform in a Q&A about credit-card regulations. You can read full piece here.

According to data cited by the International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE), “86% of credit cardholders have active rewards cards, including 77% of cardholders with a household income of less than $50,000.”

The Federalist – ICLE Academic Affiliate Todd Zywicki was quoted by The Federalist in a story about taxpayer support of university administrative expensed. You can read full piece here.

It is unclear where this excess administrative spending goes. As George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki writes, “The interesting thing about the administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing.” Schools increasingly fund positions with nebulous or vaguely defined titles, such as “student success manager” or “vibrant campus community coordinator.”