Archive for January 25th, 2010
Bad Legal Advice and the “Shaming” of Colleagues with Poor Performance
Prof W. Simon (Stanford Law School) has a controversial, amusing, piece on academics providing legal advice. In essence, Simon argues that the incentives’ structure and informational opacity surrounding academics’ advisory work leads to “bad legal advice“. In his paper, Simon seeks to provide empirical evidence of this. To this end, he actually trashes three US colleagues, who allegedly delivered bad advice in a case he was involved in.
To correct this market failure, Simon suggest a remedy consisting in increasing transparency and publicly “shaming” colleagues (disclosing their names) with poor performance. Prof. Green (Fordham University)wrote a strong rebuttal.
I paste hereafter Simon’s conclusion.
Chillin'Competition 