« Is it fitting and fair to call former Judge Kent a sex offender? Should he have to register? | Main | Some early thoughts about gendered realities in the Kent case »
March 30, 2009
Some sentencing news of note during our break
Though I doubt we will have too much extra time to talk about all the interesting sentencing developments of the last few weeks, I thought it might still be useful to spotlight here some posts from my main blog highlights some of the biggest news of the break week that was:
- Senator Jim Webb takes his concerns about prison nation to the next level
- "To Cut Costs, States Relax Prison Policies"
- The latest numbers on executions around the world
- New York drug sentencing laws finally to get serious reform
- Rapper T.I. gets a year-and-a-day federal sentence on gun charges
-
The many fascinating legal and social issues swirling around "sexting"
March 30, 2009 | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c8ccf53ef01156e9d5211970c
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Some sentencing news of note during our break:
Comments
Free T.I.! All you haters should free him. Live Your Life!!
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Mar 30, 2009 7:13:53 PM
But what about his victims, Lord Claus? I had thought you were an advocate for victims, and gun crimes of all sorts have many more victims than all sorts of other crimes.
Posted by: Doug B. | Mar 31, 2009 9:38:16 AM
Prof. Berman: That is not me. My signatures are linked to a web site, requiring a password. It is spoofed signature of one of your indoctrinated students, using the cache and the credibility of the Supremacy to promote your pro-criminal agenda.
Rent Seeking and law school indoctrination have blinded someone with an IQ of 300 to the self-evident. For example, you accept supernatural core doctrines of the law without question. The primary role of government is to provide security. You are blind to that fact. You promised to defend the Constitution, and probably love it. Yet, you support unlawful attacks on legislation, on the Constitution itself, by an out of control lawyer hierarchy.
I see you as a victim of indoctrination and of oppression by the lawyer hierarchy.
I am here to help you and to try to inoculate your students against failed Medieval supernatural doctrines that violate the Establishment Clause of our secular nation. The lawyer will thank me later when the profession is corrected, making twice its current pay, and held in public esteem 10 times greater than today.
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Mar 31, 2009 10:39:03 AM
SC: Most of the people who write, pass and seek to enforce legislation are lawyers. Wouldn't your theory lead you to believe that all law that have the imprint of lawyers are inappropriate? And, to add in your concern about security, I wonder what you have to say about gun control laws getting folks like T.I. and Plaxico Burress into trouble. Can and should powerful non-lawyers like T.I. and Plaxico Burress seek to resist gun control laws if/when they can claim that they had guns for security and since they can complain that a bunch of lawyers have been involved in the creation of gun control laws?
Also, you say "the primary role of government is to provide security." I am curious as to what other roles you think are legitimate for government. Is preserving the rue of law and due process proper government functions in your view, or should we feel comfortable having the government lock up all seemingly dangerous subversives for the sake of security? I am just curious where your theories take you, SC.
P.S. I had a feeling that the first post was not you, which is why I called you "Lord Claus."
Posted by: Doug B. | Apr 1, 2009 11:57:59 AM
Prof. Berman: To understand the argument, label it utilitarianism, perhaps, to an extreme. The first aim of government is security. The second aim is prosperity, without which, there is no excess money for government. The rest is tactics. Government cost should be profit, because government should be doing projects that require the gigantic resources of the unified government entity to achieve, and that add value. To understand the essential utility product value of government, one may try to live where there is no government. In Fallujah, one had to provide for one's own security. Try achieving anything in that city.
To review Rent Seeking for the students. First understand the opposite, profit seeking. The person adds value to a product or service, and charges a higher price than the person paid. The buyer is willing because learning surgery to do on yourself is too hard, too risky, and takes too long while the appendix is bursting. Buyer and seller do well in exchange of value. The apartment rent is profit, because the lessor gets prepared shelter on the spot. The tax cost of a road, school or military operation against Al Qaeda is profit. They all add specialized skills we deem valuable.
The Rent Seeking theory explains most anomalous lawyer and appellate decisions. The word rent has an obsolete meaning. It means the cost of enforcing an entitlement to exclusive use of the resource. Any improvement of the land, such as a planting, is termed a profit, the opposite of rent. Adam Smith spoke of profit, wage, and rent.
The modern use means using government power to extract money from others. An oil company does not spend a $billion looking for oil in dangerous places, to make $100 million profit. Instead, it hires a lobbyist for $1 million. He gets a law passed granting a $100 million government subsidy to the company. This money came from the labor of working people, collected at the point of a gun. The taxpayer does not get oil. It gets nothing, except avoidance of being shot by federal marshals or being put in jail for refusing to pay taxes. It is pernicious by its spread. Other oil companies feel stupid spending a $bil to make $100 mil in profit, when they could spend $1 mil to hire a lobbyist and get the same without risk.
Nice review:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
References are fairly advanced.
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Apr 1, 2009 6:11:38 PM
"Is preserving the rue of law and due process proper government functions in your view, or should we feel comfortable having the government lock up all seemingly dangerous subversives for the sake of security?"
The lawyer has chosen procedure and rent seeking. Year after year, with the foreseeability of planetary orbits, the lawyer has chosen to allow 17,000 murders, 5 million violent crimes, and 23 million other crimes. The criminal law, a method of lawyer job creation, and almost nothing else of value, is in failure. These victimizations represent a 40% lower rate than in the 1980's. So Scalia made the guidelines advisory, to bring the rates back to the days when more lawyers had criminal justice jobs. The lawyer fails to protect.
Then, after spending a $million each case, 20% of the folks on death row are innocent, with a quarter of those having falsely confessed.
Imagine any other business with those statistics, false negatives of about 99%, and false positives of about 20%. A plumber is able to fix only 1 in 100 broken toilets. Then he does a good job of fixing one toilet in 5 that is not even broken, that works well. Then this plumber sends a bill for $1million not depending on results. What should be done with that plumber? Let's have him run the three branches of government.
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Apr 1, 2009 9:40:58 PM
Will Apprendi/Blakely/Booker/Cunningham increase or decrease lawyer jobs? They are pro-defendant. The charge was led by conservative, anti-defendant Scalia. Why? They will increase lawyer jobs, by increasing the criminals on the loose, increasing crime by 40% again, and adding a mini-trial on sentencing.
Baze allows lethal injection. It is anti-defendant. Even more conservative personnel on the Court than in the above series. Explain the contradiction. If the Court had banned lethal injections, would that have increased or decreased lawyer employment? It would have decreased lawyer employment by ending the death penalty appellate practice, worth $billions to the lawyer profession, bogus make work paper shuffling for three lawyers, two opposing each other, one sitting on the bench, good for decades of an indoor job.
The Rent Seeking Theory is the Grand Unifying Theory of All Anomalous and Damaging Lawyer and Appellate Decision Making. The Coase Theorem is moribund or dead. Rent seeking is limited only by political considerations. The weasels on the Court know where to not go too far, again to preserve their own jobs. So any exception proves the rule by its rarity and political consideration.
Rent Seeking explains the inexplicable, the left wing bias and blindness of lawyer academia. Why have bright lawyers forgotten 10th Grade World History and Western Civ I? Why do modern, bright people indoctrinate students into anti-scientific, Medieval Church, supernatural core doctrines? Why are they trying to destroy the family, productive entities, the church, clinical care, banking, our warriors on the battlefield? Why are the academic defenders of these valuable entities all in other fields of study?
Jobs.
Rent Seeking is a conflict of interest problem that makes all lawyer utterances presumptively invalid.
That last lawyer sounding statement is itself rent seeking by its generating a separate, new dispute.
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | Apr 2, 2009 7:36:46 AM
Your love life may be stalled for a number of reasons. A recently ended relationship might leave you stranded with a condensed social circle and feelings of loneliness
Posted by: dating girl | Dec 24, 2009 8:22:49 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
Recent Comments