Lott v. Levitt Suit

Some of you may be aware that John Lott filed suit against Steven D. Levitt for defamation of character in the book Freakonomics. Professor James Lindgren at Volokh Conspiracy has a detailed explanation of the suit (and Lindgren isn't exactly on Lott's side). While Lindgren clearly believed that Lott has a pretty strong truth claim against Levitt, he didn't think it was necessarily going to be something that would win in court.

Now I see that there has been a settlement of at least part of the suit--and Lott seems to be the winner:

In documents filed on Friday in federal court, the two parties outlined a settlement that requires Mr. Levitt, who is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything, to send a letter of clarification to John B. McCall, a retired economist in Texas.

Mr. Lott's lawsuit alleges that Mr. Levitt defamed him in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. McCall. In that message, Mr. Levitt criticized Mr. Lott's work on a special 2001 issue of The Journal of Law & Economics that stemmed from a conference on gun issues held in 1999.

By some measures, Mr. Lott appears to have won little from his 15 months of litigation. No money will change hands, and the settlement does not require a formal apology from Mr. Levitt.

But on certain points of reputation and pride, Mr. Lott might take some satisfaction. Mr. Levitt's letter of clarification, which was included in Friday's filing, offers a doozy of a concession. In his 2005 message, Mr. Levitt told Mr. McCall that "it was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal." But in his letter of clarification, Mr. Levitt writes: "I acknowledge that the articles that were published in the conference issue were reviewed by referees engaged by the editors of the JLE. In fact, I was one of the peer referees."

Mr. Levitt's letter also concedes that he had been invited to present a paper at the 1999 conference. (He did not do so.) That admission undermines his e-mail message's statement that Mr. Lott had "put in only work that supported him."

In his letter of clarification to Mr. McCall, Mr. Levitt said, "At the time of my May 2005 e-mails to you, I knew that scholars with varying opinions had been invited to participate in the 1999 conference and had been informed that their papers would be considered for publication in what became the conference issue."

These would seem to be pretty severe admissions for Levitt. Each of these admits that Levitt made statements that were not only false, but that Levitt knew were false.

Lott's research (replicated by a number of other economists) was profoundly troublesome to the gun control movement. Consequently, they were looking for any possible way to destroy him and his work. The "Mary Rosh" sock puppetry opened up the door to raise questions about Lott's academic integrity.

Remember: the left is allowed to engage in all sorts of lies in their published work (see Ward Churchill and Michael Bellesiles) and the academy will bend over backward to give them the benefit of the doubt. Things work differently if you are on the right end of the spectrum.

UPDATE: More here.