Todd Zywicki links to Lott's take on Alito. Lott cites a study by Choi and Gulati but gets taken to task in comments by Frank Cross who writes:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this review by John Lott is quite misleading. Under Choi & Gulati's citation-based measure of judicial quality, Alito comes out very poorly, well down in the bottom half of all circuit court judges. That was their primary measure, and Lott doesn't mention it.
Lott, cherry picking? Who'd have thought it? Lott defends himself in later comments (under his own name, even!) . I haven't read Choi and Gulati's paper so I don't know for sure who is right here, but I know who I would bet on.
Update: Zywicki has a followup post with a couple more comments here.
More like this
This is an annotated list of John Lott's on line reviews at Amazon
and at Barnes and Noble.
Most of his reviews were posted anonymously or under a false name, and he used this anonymity to post many five-star reviews of his own books and to pan rival books.
When you post a review at…
Howard Nemerov has a post defending Lott and responding to Chris Mooney's Mother Jones article. Unfortunately, he gets his facts wrong, leaves out inconvenient facts and indulges in fallacious arguments. I'll go through his post and correct these, but first some general comments.
Even…
When I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime I wasn't sure that this review was written by Lott:
If you are interested in the facts, read this book, July 10, 2000 Reviewer: A reader from Miami, Florida A couple of friends of mine have been nagging me to read this book for a couple of…
Rhetorical bombs thrown at courts and judges are a common theme on the right and have been for quite some time. Any judge who rules against them is branded an "activist judge" seeking to impose "judicial tyranny". We hear constant screeds against "unelected judges" who "subvert the will of the…
Tim, what happened to your comments on the thread on the Volokh thread? I thought I saw at least one post from you there.