Constabulary Notes From All Over

Flash: John Lott, the guy who wrote that right-to-carry laws reduce the frequency of mass killings because perpetrators know that their intended victims might be armed, has settled his lawsuit against Steven Levitt, the guy who wrote that legalized abortion in the early 1970s helped reduce crime in the 1990s by removing unwanted children from the streets. This is the seemy underbelly of the economics profession.

Lott claimed that Levitt defamed him in an email message to the economist John McCall. In the email, Levitt claimed that an issue of the Journal of Law and Economics in which Lott published his results was not peer-reviewed and that the conference from which the papers in the volume had been drawn was closed to those with opposing viewpoints. He also claimed that "Lott's mother so ugly she looked out the window and was arrested for mooning."

In the settlement, Levitt admits that he knew at the time he wrote the email that the journal volume was peer reviewed, and that Levitt himself was one of the referees. He also acknowledges that he knew that the conference was open to people with opposing viewpoints - in fact, Levitt himself was invited, but declined to attend. Levitt also averred that his own mother, in fact, "so ugly they pay her to put her clothes on in strip joints."

Levitt's email may have come as retaliation for Lott's having written in his 2003 book that Mr. Levitt "has been described in media reports as being 'rabidly antigun'" - the rabidly antigun quote having probably come originally from Lott himself. Perhaps Levitt's opinion of Lott was further prejudiced when it was discovered that one Mary Rosh, Lott's most vociferous defender in online discussion groups, was in fact Lott's own pseudonym.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has all the details. You will need to take a long hot shower after you read it.