Month: August 2013

Paving Over NIMBYism

by Patrick Appel

Reihan wants NYC to bring down rents by encouraging more construction. He touts the proposals of David Schleicher, “a law professor at George Mason University and a leading expert on the politics of local land-use regulation”:

Opposition to new development, in New York and elsewhere, usually flows from the sense that current residents won’t actually benefit from an influx of new arrivals. The fear is that big new developments will lead to traffic congestion and crowded subways, and much else besides. With this in mind,  Schleicher’s work places heavy emphasis on getting current residents to embrace new development by, in effect, bribing them to get with the program.

In his paper, “City Unplanning,” Schleicher calls for “TILTs,” or tax-increment local transfers. The idea behind TILTs is that because new developments generate new property tax revenue, the city can buy off fretful neighbors by giving them a cut of this revenue. The citywide benefits of new development are thus shared with neighbors to the project, but there are no new taxes on development, so costs don’t rise. And while property tax abatements shrink the tax base, TILTs will spur new construction that will increase the overall property tax pie from which taxes are drawn, even after residents in affected neighborhoods get their cut.

Should Law School Last Two Years? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

Many readers address the question in rich detail:

I’m sure that many law students waste their third year of law school. But in my 3rd year, I took electives in “International Human Rights Law, Refugee Law, and Civil Liberties”; I interned part time at a local public defender’s office; and I wrote a law review article on free speech rights of high school students. Oh, and the previous year, knowing that I had plenty of time to take all the classes I needed for the bar exam, I got a couple of units for teaching a “Street Law” class at a local high school. In addition, because three years of law school means two summers, not just one, I was able to work at a small environmental law firm after my first year, and a more traditional firm (ie, one that might offer me a job) after my second year. Had law school been only two years, I might have been forced to eschew the former job.

Finally, having taught high school for many years (see, that Street Law gig paid off), I have learned that the most important things that an educational institution can offer a student are opportunities – opportunities to take nontraditional courses, to pursue various career and academic options, and to engage in intellectual inquiry. Yes, many students will waste those opportunities by playing Madden, as was the case with Elie Mystal. However, it is grossly inequitable to allow the fecklessness of a few – or even of a majority – to impoverish the education of those who desire more than the bare minimum – essentially vocational – education of a two-year law school program.

Another reader:

This post is quite timely, as my third year of law school started yesterday. We discussed the president’s comments in my class “Wealth, Democracy, and the Rule of Law”. This is something that I wrestle with because it would be great to graduate with less debt but this issue isn’t so simple. The third year of law school serves purposes beyond teaching you to “think like a lawyer.” Two things come to mind:

The first is that students would probably spend two years taking subjects that are on the bar and miss out on other classes. So besides your first-year required courses, second year would turn into another list of rote courses. There’s a virtue in giving students the opportunity to study things besides the general legal knowledge on the bar exam (like environmental law, intellectual property, poverty law) to give them an idea in the area they want to practice.

Without a third year, students couldn’t take a class like “Wealth, Democracy, and the Rule of Law” to talk about democratic legitimacy and the effect of money in a democratic system. This is a course that undergrads can take in political science, but studying it now through the lens of the law gives it something new. It can affect work as a lawyer to think about the financial inequalities in a system of laws.

Second, who will foot the bill for the transition from student to lawyer? I am lucky that my school offers clinical programs to start practicing lawyerly work, but the same instruction would cost a firm an enormous amount of money. A lawyer doesn’t start out being profitable, so hiring a two-year educated student could be a riskier investment than someone with a third-year clinic. This could make the legal employment problem even worse. More is needed than the president’s impromptu comments to bring down the costs of legal education.

Another:

While I am a strong supporter of Obama, I disagree with his thinking here. First, Obama has probably had one of the least typical post-law school legal experiences. He never practiced – whether in private practice or as part of a corporate/government legal department – for any notable period of time. He is highly familiar with the academic side of law school, but that is where his experience ends.

Where I believe law school falls short is on the practical training side. Obama’s answer is just to condense the academic side and then turn them loose on the theory that they won’t have to pay for the third year, which tends to be more of a practical application training year than an educational one. But, economics will kick in to make sure that tuition for any two-year program is sufficient to pay the professors, who likely will not easily agree to a 1/3 salary cut and other administrative costs.

Actually, if anything, the academic side could perhaps use some pruning. Constitutional law, for example, while an interesting area of tremendous importance in terms of the country’s legal framework, has practically no application to most attorneys’ daily practice. The training side of law school should start early. Not only writing and argument development – which is currently standard – but listening to and advising partners and clients. These latter qualities, while simple sounding, can be significantly more difficult and may take years to develop – even for the most academically successful student.

The benefit of the third year is learning how to apply the tools gathered from the intensive first two years. Doing this in an academic and supportive environment (or at least with mentors who are actually paid to mentor) rather than some of the cut-throat realities of the first year of private practice is likely of significantly greater value. I would also add that right now firms are generally very reluctant to hire new law grads because of their lack of any practical experience. (And I’m not talking about the rarified top firms, whose own brands sell their services and not their lawyers and who thus operate on a different business model in terms of associate recruitment than most of the legal world.) Reducing law school to solely the academic training would likely only exacerbate this problem in the short term, which would ultimately be of significantly less benefit to students from a career perspective than to pay for the third year.

Another recommends reducing the number of undergrad years instead:

Cutting law school to two years is a bad idea. What I think is a good idea: more combined BA/JD programs that let you get out of school in five or six years. It’s ridiculous that the US is the only country that requires a full baccalaureate degree before going to law school. And our baccalaureates are four years, while in Europe, they’re three.

I don’t think we need many 21-year-old lawyers on the streets, at least not without a formal paid apprenticeship or preceptorship, but the average law school graduate has completed seven years of higher education – eight if they did law school at night. That’s a lot of loans. I was in law school during the last period of time when it was possible to take out a maximum Stafford loan, pay tuition and books, and live on the rest. I was also fortunate that I paid off my college student debt during the five years I worked between college and law school. A dozen years later, I still owe $75k in student loans. I’m making headway, and I’ll eventually pay them off, but that kind of debt limits your employment (no making $35k a year working for a small nonprofit!) and makes the prospect of unemployment absolutely terrifying.

One more reader:

FYI, at least one law school I know of – Brooklyn Law School – now offers a two-year program (there are probably more – I just happen to know of Brooklyn’s because I’m an alum).  However, this two-year program costs the same as a three-year program; it just fits the same amount of classes into a shorter timespan by cutting out the summer and winter breaks.  Most law school students work as law clerks or summer interns (or “summer associates” at big firms) in the summers, so this essentially just moves that early working experience from the middle to the end of the process.

I don’t think I would have been well-served by this setup, but I’m sure it’ll be useful for some people.  They just have to reconcile themselves to opting out of the usual big firm recruitment model (which, truthfully, a lot of people are doing anyway just by going to BLS).

I’ve heard grumbling that this is a gimmick and since the tuition is the same, there’s no real innovation or change here, but I don’t entirely agree.  I left law school with a massive amount of debt and only some of that was from tuition.  Another huge portion was from living expenses – which, in New York City, are no joke.  Cutting that by a third could be a huge benefit to some people, particularly if they are trying to pay tuition with loans while living on a spouse’s income.

What I’d really like to see is true innovation in how we train lawyers by getting away from a “one size fits all” model.  I’d like to see a model in which different specialties carry different licenses based on passing different exams – kind of how teachers have different credentials for math, science, English, etc.  Some stuff would be common to all.  For example, everyone calling themselves a lawyer should have a basic grasp of constitutional principles and probably all of the other core first-year subjects as well (contracts, torts, crim law, property).  Beyond that, let students mix-and-match as suits them and their goals.

The Best Of The Dish Today

by Chris Bodenner

Syria coverage dominated the Dish today. Despite incredibly low support from the American public, Obama appeared to want a limited war, which would probably be the worst of both worlds – committing US force but not enough to stop Assad. And the president seemed to have no clear foreign policy strategy in general. A reader interjects:

What I want to know is how we’re paying for this bombing in Syria. Last I heard, the Republicans expect to shut down the government by refusing to up the debt ceiling. So how do we have extra money to go flying around the world?

My son is in the Army. Because of the sequester, he’s borrowing money from us to pay for his education, even though being able to afford that on his own was his main reason for joining. He was originally told his troop might go to Africa, then that was called off – now it might be back on. So what I want to know is what is the Army going to hit us up for next – his airfare home? Most of his battle buddies don’t have families who could pay for that. How do we have money for a symbolic bombing?

Also, as the debate over chemical weapons as a red line in Syria continued in force, news surfaced that the CIA was complicit in Saddam’s use of sarin gas. Ugh.

Meanwhile, readers shared stories of embryo donation, testified to the high rate of smoking among the Chinese, and introduced sexism to the thread on childhood classics. This week’s window contest was a tough one. The only bit of good news on the Dish today was a marked decrease in homelessness – but even that looks precarious. Best to just look at these beautiful mountains for a while, or some fragmented art. Or just watch the above MHB on repeat.

Finding Beauty In Fragments

by Jessie Roberts

dish_martin

Kyle Vanhemert crafted a photo essay from screenshots of Jeffrey Martin’s 150-gigapixel panorama of Toyko:

[I]n an image this large, where so much physical space is captured in such high resolution, there’s also, inevitably, art. Or at least fragments that are artful. It’s a little bit like a photographic version of the infinite monkeys theorem. Photograph so much life, and some of it’s bound to be evocative, in one way or another. So, on a recent afternoon, I spent three hours immersed in this frozen metropolis, searching not for sordid happenings but for those scattered bits of beauty. …

On a basic level, mine was an exercise in curation. I clicked and dragged this truly massive image across my laptop screen until something interesting wound up inside of its borders. I took screenshots of things that I would have taken photographs of had I been there in person–compositions that piqued my aesthetic interest, for one reason or another. Coming out of my three-hour Tokyo excursion was strange and disorienting–some unique virtual variety of jet lag. But the folder of screenshots I ended up with was even stranger. Did I take these photographs? Did Jeffrey Martin? Are they photographs at all? Are any of them worth a damn?

He concludes by noting that “estimates put the number of pictures being generated everyday above a billion” and that “as that number grows, finding signal amidst all that noise will inevitably become a more viable artistic pursuit.”

(Photo: Jeffrey Martin via Kyle Vanhemert)

Face Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

Taking peacocking to a whole new level:

Janamashtmi Celebrations

Hindu devotees enacting Lord Krishnas life during a Janamashtami procession on August 27, 2013 in Jammu, India. Janmashtami is an annual commemoration of the birth of the Hindu deity Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. By Nitin Kanotra/Hindustan times via Getty Images.

How We Brought Polio Back To Pakistan

by Brendan James

In 2011, as part of its plan to catch bin Laden, the CIA launched fake vaccine campaign. Ben Richmond reports on the blowback:

A local warlord banned vaccinations after Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi was linked to the CIA operation to find Osama bin Laden. Under the guise of giving out a Hepatitis B vaccination, the doctor collected DNA samples from children, looking for bin Laden’s family members. A link was established between the CIA and vaccinations and starting on June 16, 2012, tribal leaders banned the vaccination campaign. The Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur said vaccinations would be banned until the CIA stopped its drone campaign in North Waziristan, according to UPI.

And the ban has been enforced. In the 14 months since it was lowered, at least 22 people involved in vaccination efforts have been killed and another 14 have been injured. As a result, an estimated 300,000 children in North and South Waziristan were forbidden from vaccinations, and the UN was forced to suspend polio eradication efforts in Pakistan. There have been 24 cases of polio in Pakistan so far this year, and three cases of paralysis, but as the New York Times pointed out, “even one case shows that the virus is in the area and could spread.”

Health officials have long warned the strategy was a mistake:

The medical community is understandably pissed at the CIA for compromising them and making their difficult work even harder. … An opinion piece in Scientific American from May 2 outlined, in more detail and stronger language, why the CIA shouldn’t have used a sham-vaccination ruse. “Few mourn [bin Laden] the man responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of innocent people worldwide over the years,” the article said. “But the operation that led to his death may yet kill hundreds of thousands more.”

Obama Wants A Little War

by Patrick Appel

SYRIA-CONFLICT

Fisher outlines what appears to be the administration’s Syria plan:

[W]hat the Obama administration appears to want is a limited, finite series of strikes that will be carefully calibrated to send a message and cause the just-right amount of pain. It wants to set Assad back but it doesn’t want to cause death and mayhem. So the most likely option is probably to destroy a bunch of government or military infrastructure – much of which will probably be empty.

Drum labels this course of action “useless”:

All the evidence suggests that Obama is considering the worst possible option in Syria: a very limited air campaign with no real goal and no real chance of influencing the course of the war. You can make a defensible argument for staying out of the fight entirely, and you can make a defensible argument for a large-scale action that actually accomplishes something (wiping out Assad’s air force, for example), but what’s the argument for the middle course? I simply don’t see one.

Franklin Spinney argues that this plan relies on the “marriage of two fatally-flawed ideas”:

1. Coercive diplomacy assumes that carefully calibrated doses of punishment will persuade any adversary, whether an individual  terrorist or a national government, to act in a way that we would define as acceptable.

2. Limited precision bombardment assumes we can administer those doses precisely on selected “high-value” targets using guided weapons, fired from a safe distance, with no friendly casualties, and little unintended damage.

This marriage of pop psychology and bombing lionizes war on the cheap, and it increases our country’s  addiction to strategically counterproductive drive-by shootings with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs.

Fallows seconds Spinney:

For 20 years now we have seen this pattern:

1. Something terrible happens somewhere — and what is happening in Syria is not just terrible but atrocious in the literal meaning of that term.

2. Americans naturally feel we must “do something.”

3. The easiest something to do involves bombers, drones, and cruise missiles, all of which are promised to be precise and to keep our forces and people at a safe remove from the battle zone.

4. In the absence of a draft, with no threat that taxes will go up to cover war costs, and with the reality that modern presidents are hamstrung in domestic policy but have enormous latitude in national security, the normal democratic checks on waging war don’t work.

5. We “do something,” with bombs and drones, and then deal with blowback and consequences “no one could have foreseen.”

Larison suspects that a bombing campaign will quickly escalate:

Since almost everyone concedes that the planned strikes are virtually useless, it is hard to believe that the administration won’t feel compelled to launch additional attacks on the Syrian government when the first strikes fail to change regime behavior. There will presumably be increasing domestic and international pressure for an escalation of U.S. involvement once the U.S. begins attacking Syria, and once Obama has agreed to take direct military action of one kind he will have greater difficulty resisting the pressure for even more. There is also always a possibility that Assad and his patrons could retaliate against U.S. forces or clients, in which case the pressure to escalate U.S. involvement will become much harder to resist.

And Gregory Djerejian, who is conflicted over whether or not to intervene in Syria, argues that we “should not simply bomb for 36 hours, and then go away again”:

This would likely prove worse than doing nothing. We need to re-engage in a holistic Syria policy that squarely grapples with broader regional dynamics and that ultimately leads to a negotiated solution, a task we’d shirked, but where Assad’s use of [chemical weapons (CW)] appears to have forced a reluctant President to more forcefully engage. So if we are going in, we’re going in for more than a few Tomahawks so everyone can get a late August pat on the back that ‘something was done’. It’s not quite Colin Powell’s old so-called Pottery Barn rule: ‘you break it, you own it’. It’s perhaps more here, ‘you bomb it, the breakage is yours too’. Are we up to this? Our national security team? The strategic follow-through? The countless hours of spade-work with allies and, yes, foes? I just don’t know.

I am straddling the fence and unsure, but it is one man ultimately who will decide. My thoughts are with him, this may be a more momentous decision than he may wholly realize. I would not begrudge him standing aside, if he feels the ‘roll-in the cavalry’ noises to date have caused Assad to blink already creating a sufficient enough deterrent impact (though this is dubious). He must also ask himself, when he thinks honestly taking his private counsel, whether he believes he and his team really have the appetite and abilities once embarking on this course to actually succeed in it. These are not easy questions. Yet they demand answers and realistic appraisal. As part of that analysis, one must honestly reckon too with the emerging school of thought that we can bifurcate a military action aimed purely to deter on CW, but without enmeshing ourselves in the conflict and attempting to influence broader outcomes. One doubts it could play out so neatly, and such assumptions should be amply stress-tested.

(Photo: A Syrian man reacts while standing on the rubble of his house while others look for survivors and bodies in the Tariq al-Bab district of the northern city of Aleppo on February 23, 2013. Three surface-to-surface missiles fired by Syrian regime forces in Aleppo’s Tariq al-Bab district left 58 people dead, among them 36 children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on February 24. By Pablo Tosco/AFP/Getty Images)

Adopting An Embryo, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader strongly considered donating:

My wife and I went through the process of in vitro. (And when I say “we”, I mean she endured all the work and physical suffering while I became an expert masturbator. Little known fact: if you have not donated sperm for fertility procedures, you are still a novice. Yes, this means you should keep up your practice.)

The second implantation was a success. We started discussing using the final three embryos for another child when she became pregnant the old fashioned way. Positive we don’t want to implant any more of the remaining embryos, my wife and I face the decision of what to do with them. I struggle with the idea of donating them to another set of parents, mostly because I know how fragile I am at 38 and believe some part of it sprouts from my genetic code. And my family and I are experts in dealing with our brand of crazy. I know my two-year-old needs me, and I guess I just don’t trust anyone else with that responsibility. It is a mix of selfishness and insecurity (and an odd dose of self-righteousness) that makes me believe donation to medical research is the right alternative.

I thought we had made the decision, but the paperwork sits on our kitchen counter and the cryogenic freezer bills still show up every quarter. With all the effort and mental anguish over 3+ years, whatever we decide, it seems like something I will think deeply about for the rest of my life.

Another couple made a different decision:

My husband and I have twins via donor-egg IVF and we had 16 embryos left over. We assumed we’d donate them to science – after all, it was science that enabled us to have our twins in the first place. But after a few years of paying for the freezing fees – for our boys’ “potential siblings on ice,” as we called them – we were pushed to make a decision; the fee was going up and we realized we were sitting on a bounty. Why not give another family a chance at parenthood?

My husband was hesitant initially.

He was the one with the DNA connection to our boys’ frozen siblings. But he pretty quickly came around – no emotional toil! We both felt: Hey, wouldn’t it be cool for our boys to have siblings we didn’t have to potty train and send to college? I will admit that we wanted some level of “control” over who did get to raise our kids’ fro-bros. We are Jewish atheists (not an oxymoron, as you know), and we posted a Match.com-type ad on a website stating, essentially: Republicans and Christianists need not apply. Does the world need more children raised by the likes of Rick Santorum? We felt not.

We got seven takers and chose a non-religious, pro-Obama couple in another state. We drove three hours to meet them and had a lovely chat. We decided that we’d stay in touch and eventually would have our children meet each other.

Unfortunately, the wife miscarried twice with our embryos and blew through 13 of the 16 with no child to show for all the money and heartache. They then turned to the Czech Republic (much cheaper) for a fresh cycle (higher success rate than frozen) and now have a newborn daughter. We don’t know if they’ll try again with our three remaining embryos.

My motivation in this whole endeavor had nothing to do with the embryos or their “right” to life. All of the fertility treatments I’ve been through have only confirmed my belief that life does not begin at conception. Conception doesn’t mean shit. Neither does implantation. Walking out of a hospital with a newborn in a car seat – that’s life.

YouTube In The War Room

by Patrick Appel

Matt Steinglass thinks the “decisive factor” propelling America’s to intervene in Syria is “the rapid availability of mesmerisingly horrifying video imagery of the gas victims” (such as the video above):

In Iraq, video imagery of Saddam’s Kurdish gas victims ultimately came out, but it took years; there was no sense of urgency or an ongoing threat. Even so, the imagery of the massacres ultimately seeded a longstanding American sympathy for the Kurdish cause and remained the clearest indictment of Saddam as a mass murderer. The impact of such video images rests partly on the unique horror of poison gas in the Western imagination.

Waldman makes an important point about these images:

If you’ve watched the coverage of these events on television, you’ve no doubt heard the warnings from anchors: “The images we’re about to show you are disturbing.” And indeed they are, particularly the ones of children—a child being washed down in a dingy hospital while crying out in anguish, rows upon rows of dead children’s bodies, and so on. But it’s precisely because chemical weapons leave no visible injuries that these images can be shown. If the same number of children had been blown apart by bombs, you’d never see the pictures at all, because the editors would have considered them too gruesome to broadcast. And not having seen the images, we might be just a little less horrified.

Erik Voeten identifies one reason the taboo against chemical weapons exists:

Historically, chemical weapons have been heavily associated with poison; the quintessential weapon of the weak, which undermines proper battles for political power based on physical strength. This makes chemical weapons usage easy to associate with cowardice.

Earlier Dish on chemical weapons here.