Are lawsuits the new black?
Because Dan Brown’s getting sued just about every day, and now Steven Levitt — the University of Chicago economist and co-author of the wildly popular FREAKONOMICS — has just had one slapped upon him and his publisher, HarperCollins, by former Yale Law School researcher John Lott, whose work Levitt discusses in the bestselling book.
The crux of the suit, according to Bloomberg News, is that “when [Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner] wrote that other scholars had been unable to replicate Lott’s research linking lower crime rates with the right to carry guns.” The passage amounts to an allegation that Lott falsified his results, according to the lawsuit. Lott’s suit asks for a halt in sales, a retraction in the next printing of the book and unspecified damages from Levitt and HarperCollins.
The thing that seems odd is that Dubner isn’t named as a co-defendant — but that’s likely because Lott doesn’t have a longstanding axe to grind against him as he seems to have with Levitt. The story stretches back to a 2001 panel at the National Academy of Sciences where Levitt’s research on gun control was ultimately attacked by Lott — anonymously — in print and online. It’s always fun when grudges end up as lawsuits…
(Ron adds: It’s not as if doubts about John Lott’s research techniques haven’t come up before…and if we had comments on GalleyCat, you could be sure that he’d be posting up a storm as “Mary Rosh,” the genderbending alter ego who exists only to attack Lott attackers online.)
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