(Credit: Shutterstock)

As New York City considers whether to expand the franchise to non-citizens, it’s instructive to look the experience other municipalities, like Takoma Park, Maryland, have had with non-citizen voting.

ThinkProgress spoke with two experts on non-citizen voting: Montgomery County (MD) Council member George Leventhal and Maryland State Sen. Jamie Raskin (D). Both individuals helped initiate Takoma Park’s non-citizen voting policy in 1991.

Here are the main issues and concerns with expanding voting rights to non-citizens:

Why is non-citizen voting important? After the 1990 census, Takoma Park went about redistricting its wards to reflect the new population numbers. The wards were drawn to include equal numbers of residents, but, as Raskin, who sat on the commission, noticed, some wards had twice the number of voters. The reason: some wards had high numbers of non-citizen voters. As a result, voters in wards without many non-citizen residents found their vote worth half as much as those elsewhere. Ignoring non-citizens when drawing the boundary lines in an attempt to circumvent this problem is prohibited by the Supreme Court. As a result, the commission proposed a city-wide referendum to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, which passed in February 1992.

Non-citizens can only vote in local elections. Perhaps the most important part of non-citizen voting is that non-citizens are only allowed to vote in local elections. There are valid reasons to want federal elections, which have a big impact on our nation’s foreign policy, decided only by American citizens. But, as Leventhal explained to ThinkProgress, “If you live in a town, you’re interested in getting your garbage picked up and your property taxes.” In other words, parochial matters like city services and local taxes impact both citizen and non-citizen residents alike.

There is a long history of non-citizen voting in the United States. Non-citizen voting may feel weird. It shouldn’t. For most of American history, non-citizens were permitted to vote in 22 states and federal territories. It wasn’t until the 1920s that, amidst anti-immigrant hysteria, lawmakers began to bar non-citizens from voting.

What impact has non-citizen voting had on local policies? “Very little,” according to Leventhal. He noted that critics of the proposal argued in 1991 that if Takoma Park legalized non-citizen voting, the city would soon become a “welfare magnet” where non-citizens would supposedly vote for massive new benefits that would attract more non-citizens, creating a cycle. But in the past 20 years, Leventhal notes, non-citizen voting has “had virtually no effect on the policies of the cities.” Raskin agreed: “it hasn’t been a transforming event in the life of the city.”

Does it cost a lot? No. Because non-citizens can only vote in local Takoma Park elections which take place in odd-numbered years, there’s no need to print separate ballots. Non-citizens register and vote on the same ballot as everyone else, rendering the cost trivial.

Will it lead to non-citizens fraudulently voting in federal elections? No. Like New York City, Takoma Park elections are held in odd-numbered years and don’t coincide with state or national elections.

Would it work in a city the size of New York? Non-citizens make up more than one-third of New York’s population, meaning a massive chunk of the city’s taxpayers are currently disenfranchised. Raskin doubts that New York’s experience would be much different from Takoma Park’s, for a few reasons. First, the non-citizen population tends to be fairly transient. Second, they tend to be disproportionately poor, a contributing factor in their low turnout rates in other municipalities.

How do non-citizens feel about the initiative? Like citizen voters, turnout among non-citizens is abysmally low. For example, in 2009, 436 non-citizens were registered to vote in Takoma Park, but just 32 cast a ballot. That’s even lower than the already-low turnout rate of 16 percent among citizens of Takoma Park. On the other hand, Raskin notes that those non-citizens who do cast a ballot are very grateful for the opportunity. Many are foreign businesspeople, or diplomatic personnel, or employees at the World Bank. “It makes them feel like they’re part of the community,” Raskin said, noting that local citizens also want to embrace foreigners in the area because “there’s a neighborly dimension to this.”

Many other countries allow non-citizens to vote. At least 20 countries give non-citizens the right to vote. They include a broad range of nations, from Denmark to Chile to New Zealand.

Photo by John Montgomery

Three-plus years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s corporate money in politics decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the movement to overturn some of its central holdings has not abated. On Tuesday, Los Angeles passed a ballot measure to endorse state and federal amendments overturning the decision, with an overwhelming 76.6 percent in favor of the resolution. The nation’s second-largest city now joins 400 other jurisdictions, including 175 cities and 13 states, in rejecting the notion that corporations are people, and the Supreme Court’s holding that corporate spending will not lead to corruption.

The Los Angeles measure calls on state legislators and regional members of Congress to both propose and support any amendments that would limit parts of both Citizens United v. FEC and an earlier decision striking down campaign finance limits, Buckley v. Valeo. The resolution, Proposition C, asserts that “corporations do not have the constitutional rights of human beings,” “corporations do not engage in constitutionally protected speech when spending corporate money to influence the electoral process,” and limits on political spending that ensure all Americans have an opportunity to be heard are permissible. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear another case that could make it even easier for the wealthy to buy elections.

On Tuesday, ThinkProgress ran a story by Zack Beauchamp on Dr. Jason Richwine’s graduate dissertation on Hispanic IQ and immigration titled “The Inside Story Of The Harvard Dissertation That Became Too Racist For Heritage.” Thursday night, Dr. Richwine reached out to provide his side of the story. What follows is Richwine’s letter and Beauchamp’s response.

Jason Richwine writes:

This may disappoint some people, but there is no fascinating inside story of how I was awarded a PhD. The simple, boring explanation is that my dissertation is a solid piece of research. The “errors and omissions” that Zack Beauchamp claims to have uncovered exist only in a caricature of my dissertation. He knocks down a lot of straw men, but he doesn’t land any blows on my actual work.

Two factual corrections: First, my wife is not an immigrant. Second, I took the normal five years to complete my degree, not four, so readers can forget all that innuendo about sacrificing quality and depth for the sake of rushing.

Now for the substantive critiques. The extent to which self-identified Hispanics share a common genetic heritage is not important to my argument. As I explain on pages 76 and 77, the average IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites should be of concern because it is persistent over generations. Whether that persistence is due to genetics, environment, culture, or some other factor does not change the fact that the difference exists. It would be necessary to explore the biological basis for Hispanic identity only if my argument depended on a genetic transmission of IQ differences. It doesn’t.

I understand that Professor von Vacano has written extensively on the topic of Hispanic identity. And I also understand that scholars have a tendency to think their own specialty is hugely relevant to what everyone else studies. But, in reality, a long discussion of Professor von Vacano’s research interest would add little value to my dissertation.

I’m a bit bewildered by the rest of the critiques because they aren’t really critiques at all. The environment’s role in shaping IQ, the limits of IQ as a predictor of individual success, and the importance of non-cognitive abilities are all mentioned in my dissertation, sometimes in considerable detail. It’s difficult not to conclude that Beauchamp has intentionally ignored or downplayed my coverage of these issues in order to falsely portray my work as “sloppy.”

Take, for example, my conclusion regarding attempts to raise IQ. Beauchamp eventually acknowledges that I’m correct—that is, it is very difficult and perhaps impossible to permanently and substantially raise IQ through intervention programs. However, in what is supposed to be a devastating rebuttal of me, Beauchamp says these programs may still provide non-cognitive benefits. Strange—that sounds a lot like me! Page 70, footnote 20 of my dissertation:

This is not to say that Head Start or any other intervention inherently lacks value. Some programs may help children make non-cognitive gains in educational achievement and reduce their chances of committing crimes. These programs should be evaluated, using proper cost-benefit analysis, with all their strengths in mind, even if IQ enhancement is not one of them.

Or how about page 84:

When comparing individuals, the effect of IQ differences is often small. A large number of personality attributes, many of which are unrelated to IQ, affect a person’s ability to succeed in life. For that reason, an individual’s IQ score is merely a probability of future success, not a prediction from a crystal ball. For example, a person’s IQ affects his likelihood of completing college, but some college graduates are not very smart. Betting that an individual person with an IQ of 100 will complete more years of schooling than a person with an IQ of 95 is a risky gamble. The less intelligent person may be a very hard worker, while the smarter person could be lazy and unmotivated.

Does this look like the writing of, in Beauchamp’s words, an “IQ fundamentalist” who thinks IQ is “an almost-perfect guide to someone’s prospects for success in life”?

IQ is not the only important human trait—not by a long shot. Nevertheless, it remains an important predictor, on average, of many socioeconomic outcomes we care about. There can be no denying this. I continue:

However, if presented with two groups of 100 random Americans, one group with average IQ 95, the other group at 100, it is a virtual certainty that the smarter group will have higher educational attainment. In this way, IQ scores can be thought of as individual probabilities that aggregate into certainties in large groups.

That’s the crux of the issue.

The general claim that I ignored contrary evidence simply can’t be supported by a fair reading of the text. For example, much is made of my prominent citation of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. But I also discussed two major critiques of that book. On pages 82 and 83 of the dissertation, I even draw this conclusion: “It appears that Herrnstein and Murray’s critics have succeeded in establishing a larger role for the environment, without proving a lesser role for [IQ].” Is that something that a blind follower of Charles Murray would write?

Beauchamp seems to have decided a priori that my dissertation is one-sided, then viewed the entire work through that mental filter. He says I was “forced to concede” that environmental deprivation can adversely affect IQ. I did include environmental influences in my long discussion of what factors impact IQ differences, as any careful scholar would. Why Beauchamp characterizes this as a forced concession is not clear.

Regarding the quality of the datasets, that’s discussed in depth in chapter 2. The samples vary in size, but they all yield results pointing in the same direction. Furthermore, Beauchamp seems to think I haven’t noticed the critiques of Lynn and Vanhanen’s national IQ data. See pages 27 and 28 for a full discussion, in which I cite eight different academic references on that topic.

I could go on, but I’m already getting repetitive. Beauchamp ignores what’s actually in my dissertation so that he can say it’s full of omissions.

Substantive issues aside, another disappointing element in the article is the treatment of the quote from Christopher Jencks, who was my third committee member. The article uses the quote to imply that I ignored important parts of Jencks’ critique of my dissertation.

That never happened. In reality, my interaction with Professor Jencks was as normal as the rest of the process I followed in producing my dissertation. Like my other advisors, he gave me extensive written comments and suggestions. I revised the dissertation accordingly. I then sent Professor Jencks a 33-page document that detailed exactly how I revised the text in response to every single concern that he had expressed. In no case did I ignore a comment or fail to make revisions as I thought appropriate.

In response, Professor Jencks wrote to me in an email: “I think you have done a thorough and conscientious job of dealing with my comments, criticisms, and suggestions, and I am happy to approve it as it stands.” This didn’t mean he agreed with everything. He went on to say that he continued to be concerned with my use of ethnic categories like “Asian” and “Hispanic,” which he believes are inappropriately broad when talking about culture, and he felt that I left too little room for the differential effects of IQ on culture within ethnic groups. “That said,” he concluded, “I’m not asking for more revisions, just making suggestions for you to think about in the future.”

May I suggest that this is a completely normal situation in PhD programs? It would be a rare committee indeed if every member agreed with every data interpretation and policy judgment in the dissertation that they approved. My interactions with all my dissertation advisors, including Professor Jencks as the third reader, followed normal protocol from beginning to end.

Here is the truth about my dissertation: It’s a careful empirical analysis, firmly grounded in the mainstream of psychological science, vetted by a team of respected scholars, well researched, fully sourced, and a valuable contribution to policy discussions. I know, I know—what a boring reason to be awarded a PhD!

Beauchamp responds:

My thanks to Dr. Richwine for the factual clarifications. If only his treatment of my article, and his own dissertation, had been so forthright.

On the issue of his incomplete definition of the term “Hispanic,” Richwine suggests the only thing that matters is that the persistence of low Hispanic IQ on tests over generations. As it happens, I addressed this potential rebuttal at length in my original piece. The reason the definition matters, even if some pattern can be shown inside a group, is that it’s impossible to identify what that pattern means about the group and whether that pattern will continue unless you know what makes that group unique. As I put it:

Why do definitions matter if Richwine succeeds in showing a deep, persistent difference between so-called “Hispanics” and “whites?” Aside from the fact that it makes it impossible to figure out the scope of the dissertation (are Mexicans of largely European descent likely to have low IQs? What about African-descendent Brazilians?)…Without a proper definition of what he means when he says Hispanic, we have no way of evaluating the role that immigrants’ “Hispanicness” — whether that means shared genes, culture, or national background — plays in determining their IQ. Put differently, in order to know whether and how being Hispanic matters for IQ, we need to know what it means to be Hispanic. That, in turn, makes it impossible to evaluate how meaningful Richwine’s conclusions about the persistence of the IQ gap are or how they apply to any particular group of immigrants.

The purportedly exculpatory email from Professor Jencks he provides makes this point for me. In Richwine’s own summary, Jencks “continued to be concerned with my use of ethnic categories like ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic,’ which he believes are inappropriately broad when talking about culture.” This inappropriate broadness is precisely the point — they are so broad, I argue, as to make generalization about them meaningless without ample defense of why such a generalization is appropriate in this case. Richwine provides none, choosing to ignore the overwhelming literature on the social construction of race.

Similarly, Richwine misses my point on early childhood interventions and non-cognitive skills. The argument does not depend on whether Richwine mentions these factors occasionally in his dissertation — as Richwine points out above, I address his arguments on interventions specifically. Rather, my point was that he ignores the way in which such factors fatally frustrate his attempt to make broad predictions about immigrants based on their IQ. As I put it, “there’s simply no reason to think IQ matters enough to provide the juice for sweeping theories about the life prospects of entire groups of immigrants.” The proof of IQ fundamentalism is in the pudding.

For instance, on the issue of early childhood interventions, he does not attempt to explain whether or not the non-IQ related gains they produce (gains he consigns to a footnote) might be able to make up for any of the costs he associates with low-IQ immigration. For instance, on page 93, he argues that “Hispanics become less willing to play by the rules of the middle class when their low average IQ prevents them from joining it,” thus explaining why Hispanic immigration will produce more “underclass” behavior like dropping out of school and criminality. However, early childhood interventions can improve educational attainment and reduce criminality down the line — as he notes in his own footnote! Richwine pays lip service to factors other than IQ scores being important, yet edits them out of his substantive analysis.

This pattern repeats itself on the broader issue of non-cognitive traits. Richwine argues that (p. 100) “IQ has been linked to possessing middle class values, having a future time orientation, and cooperating in competitive games” in order to make his argument that Hispanic immigration will further lower social capital and “trust” inside the United States. These qualities bear intimate resemblance to non-cognitive traits like Conscientiousness or Agreeableness that either aren’t all that closely linked to IQ or, on some accounts, actually explain certain levels of performance on IQ tests. Yet Richwine never attempts to explore the connection between social trust and non-cognitive traits, or even establish that Hispanics lack the relevant non-cognitive qualities.

Essentially, Richwine suggests the supposedly lower Hispanic IQ will predict bad behavior without bothering to establish whether the immigrant populations might have or be able (with education) to get to higher levels of other traits that would counterbalance any IQ deficit. That sounds pretty “one-sided” to me.

I could go point-by-point on the other, lesser charges — for instance, his discussion of the flaws in the Lynn and Vanhanen data is hardly “full,” and he doesn’t consider criticisms of The Bell Curve in each case where it might be warranted. But, in Richwine’s words, “I’m already getting repetitive.”

Over the course of three weeks, WUSA 9 anchors examined almost 100 taxis on Saturday night between 6:00 pm and 2:00 am. Anchors followed several black customers, both actors and real people, as they tried to hail a cab around DC. Of those passengers who were picked up, the investigation revealed that white customers got a cab in as little as 15 seconds, while black passengers sometimes waited for almost 15 minutes.

In a few cases, black passengers were ejected from the cab in favor of white passengers, or because the cab wouldn’t go to the black person’s destination.

Watch it:

(HT: Huffington Post)

The marijuana arrest rate is particularly alarming because only “public view” possession of marijuana is a crime in New York City. It is reportedly a common practice to ask suspects to take everything out of their pockets after a police stop, and then arrest those who reveal marijuana on the theory that it is now in “public view.” The NYCLU’s study also found that, “[t]hough frisks can be legally conducted only when an officer reasonably suspects the person has a weapon that might endanger officer safety, 55.8 percent of those stopped in 2012 were frisked. Of those frisked, a weapon was found only 2 percent of the time.”

The NYCLU report is one of several analyses to emerge from recently released NYPD data, as a months-long trial concludes on the constitutional challenge to NYPD’s rampant stops of New Yorkers. While the number of stop-and-frisks has dropped somewhat since the program drew heightened controversy, the dramatic disproportionate application of the tactic to minorities has continued. Eighty-seven percent of those stopped in 2012 were black and Latino. Another analysis out this week from New York City’s Public Advocate found that these disproportionate stops do not reflect the ratios of minority-to-white crime: whites stopped by police were two to three times more likely to be found with weapons than blacks and Latinos. And a recent comparison of stop-and-frisk and crime data showed that as the stop-and-frisk rate dropped, so, too, did the crime rate.

The remarks, filmed last week during a roundtable discussion hosted by ALDÍA NewsMedia, also captured Corbett joking that Latino people don’t live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, Corbett’s staff identified Maria Montero, the Director of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs. The Philly Post has more:

I would have published this sooner, but I was waiting from a response from Corbett’s people confirming that there’s really no one else. In fairness, the administration also used to employ preternaturally grumpy Eli Aliva as Secretary of Health and nominated Ken Trujillo for Commissioner of the PLCB.

Corbett also lashed out at ThinkProgress during an event on Thursday and highlighted his administration’s effort to nominate a Latino nominee. “There are candidates out there on the Democratic side [and] there are liberal organizations coming out of Washington that want to have an impact on the governor’s race here in Pennsylvania,” he sad. “I nominated Ken Trujillo, a well-known Latino Hispanic from Philadelphia, a Democrat for the LCB. The Democrats rejected him. Why aren’t you writing about that?”

ThinkProgress has previously reported that the governor has established a commission of Latino affairs, which his website describes as “the Commonwealth’s advocate agency for its Latino community.”

To illustrate his point, Husted noted that the 135 cases of possible voter fraud referred for further investigation are a tiny percentage of more than 5.6 million votes cast in the presidential election last November. Most of these cases involved people who tried to double-vote by either voting in two different precincts or sending an absentee ballot and then showing up at the polls. According to a Cincinnati Enquirer report, most of these voters were not trying to swing the election illegally, but were worried their ballots got lost in the mail or followed incorrect instructions from poll workers.

Husted emphasized the fact that the safeguards in the voting system prevented these people from actually getting both their votes counted, as most cast one or more provisional ballots. Provisional ballots are used if there is some question regarding the voter’s eligibility, and are often discarded even if the voter is legitimate.

Conservative groups searching for compelling evidence of in-person voter fraud have seized on Ohio’s investigation as proof that voting restrictions, like strict voter ID laws, are necessary. Before the election, Husted toyed with supporting a strict voter ID law pushed by Republican lawmakers, but ultimately dropped it despite enthusiastic Republican support. After the voter fraud investigation, however, Husted observed that “a photo ID wouldn’t have mattered in most of these cases.”

However, the Secretary was quick to note that the investigation uncovered no evidence of voter suppression. Husted became one of the most notorious election officials of 2012 due to his multiple attempts to bend the law and restrict early voting hours despite multiple counties’ requests to stay open to accommodate residents. A report after the election determined that Husted’s early voting restrictions created much longer lines for urban voters than those in suburban or rural areas. Though Husted is claiming there was no formal evidence of voter suppression, the marathon lines endured by thousands of voters in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati speak for themselves.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In the latest move by Louisiana to plow ahead with looser gun laws, the state legislature passed a measure that would criminalize journalists for publishing information about gun owners. Under House Bill 8, which now goes to Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) for his signature, those who “release, disseminate, or make public” any information contained in a handgun permit or about the identity of the permit-holder, including journalists, may be subject to a $10,000 fine and/or six months in jail.

The law comes in response to anger over the publication by a local New York newspaper of the names and addresses of gun permit holders. But as Mother Jones reports, the law goes beyond most others that merely forbid the release of gun permit information, to one punishing journalists for publishing it, in likely violation of the First Amendment.

The seminal Supreme Court case upholding the New York Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers said government attempts to impose a “prior restraint” on journalists’ reporting is unconstitutional. And while some First Amendment scholars concede an argument could be made that this law does not impose prior restraint but merely punishment after the fact, even that sort of First Amendment restriction would have be accompanied by an unusually compelling justification for so severe an infringement on First Amendment rights.

“I find it very ironic that the very people who screamed the loudest about attempts to limit their Second Amendment rights are here eager to limit my First Amendment rights,” newspaper editor Carl Redman said during a May 7 hearing.

Other bills passed by both houses of the Louisiana legislature this week would allow for lifetime gun permits, and allow off-duty officers to carry their weapons onto college campuses.

The state Senate is set to consider four additional gun bills Monday, including one to nullify federal gun law that even its sponsor admits is likely unconstitutional. The state passed a constitutional amendment by ballot initiative last November that arguably makes state gun rights even broader than the Second Amendment.

A Florida honor student who was expelled and faced possible felony charges for a science experiment gone awry has not only been cleared of charges, she’s heading to space camp thanks to a former NASA employee.

Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot combined household cleaner and aluminum foil in an eight-ounce water bottle on school grounds on April 22, curious to see what would happen. The chemical reaction “created a pop that sounds like a firecracker and smoke,” but no students were injured nor does there appear to have been property damage. At the suggestion of Florida Assistant State Attorney Tammy Glotfelty and after her science teacher said she had not sanctioned the experiment, the responding officer arrested Wilmot and charged her with possessing or discharging weapons or firearms at a school sponsored event or on school property and possessing any destructive devices — both felonies she would have been tried for as an adult. Pursuant to her school’s zero tolerance policy, Wilmot was also expelled at the time of the incident.

But last week the criminal charges against Wilmot were dropped following significant media coverage and an online petition that attracted nearly 200,000 signatures, upset that the arrest was the equivalent of criminalizing curiosity. She remains banned from her school, but her family is in discussions with the administration about a possible reinstatement.

Wilmot’s story caught the eye of Homer Hickam, an 18-year NASA veteran and author of the memoir “Rocket Boys,” later adapted into the film “October Sky.”  Hickman had his own brush with law enforcement during his teens. Hickman and several friends were led away from his high school in handcuffs for allegedly starting a forest fire, but his physics teacher and principal cleared him of wrongdoing.

Hickam said he “couldn’t let this go without doing something,” and while he’s not a lawyer, he could at least “give her something that would encourage her” and settled on purchasing her a scholarship to the United States Space Academy, a five-day college accredited course offered through the University of Alabama-Huntsville. After learning Wilmot has a twin sister, he raised additional funds so they could attend together in July.

While Hickam attended school long before the advent of zero tolerance policies, since then kids who make mistakes have increasingly faced criminal charges for what amount to disciplinary violations, particularly minority students like Wilmot.

In no small part because of Srinivasan’s stellar legal credentials, the New Yorker’s Jeff Toobin claimed that “if Srinivasan passes this test and wins confirmation, he’ll be on the Supreme Court before President Obama’s term ends.” This claim is premature. At the very least, court watchers — and the President himself — should have some idea what Srinivasan thinks about the law before he joins the most powerful Court in the land, and Srinivasan’s views are largely unknown. After some time on the DC Circuit, Srinivasan may indeed emerge as a leading candidate for the Supreme Court. In the mean time, here are ten other possible candidates that could appeal to a Democratic president:

1. Paul Watford

Ninth Circuit Judge Paul Watford was among President Obama’s most outstanding appointees during his first term. A former clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Watford is in his mid-40s and thus has many years of eligibility left for the Supreme Court. Like Srinivasan, Watford spent much of his career at a large law firm, so he should ideally spend enough time as a court of appeals judge that his views on important legal issues are clear. Nevertheless, he is likely to be near the top of any Democrat’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

2. Jane Kelly

Eighth Circuit Judge Jane Kelly began her career with the kind of credentials that all but guarantee a lucrative career to lawyers who want one — a Harvard Law degree and a United States Court of Appeals clerkship. Yet she chose to spend nearly two decades as a federal public defender instead. She also experienced an unusually easy confirmation process due to a personal tie to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). In a perfect world, she would spend some time as an appeals court judge becoming more familiar with the civil side of her docket, but the sort of attorney who passes up huge law firm salaries to ensure that criminal defendants receive excellent representation would be a welcome addition to the Supreme Court.

3. Alison Nathan

Appointing a federal district judge like Alison Nathan directly to the Supreme Court is unusual, but Judge Nathan’s experience as a trial judge would be a helpful addition to a Court that currently only has one former trial judge, Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Nathan is a former law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens, and a former Associate White House Counsel. She would also be the first openly gay justice if confirmed to the Supreme Court.

4. Kamala Harris

Supreme Court observers ignore SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein at their peril, so we will not make that mistake by leaving out his views regarding the next Supreme Court nominee. Last year, Goldstein named Harris as an “ideal nominee” based on her youth, qualifications, and that fact that she would diversify the Supreme Court’s bench. One way she would add diversity is by becoming the only former elected official on the nation’s highest Court, a perspective that could make her particularly effective in pushing back against misguided election decisions such as Citizens United.

5. Goodwin Liu

California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu had a rough ride as a nominee to the Ninth Circuit, largely due to spurious claims that he would use a seat on the bench to, in Grassley’s words, make America more like “communist-run China.” Since joining California’s highest court, Justice Liu has instead emerged as “a paragon of judicial restraint,” in one law professor’s words. While Senate Republicans are unlikely to consider this fact if the president nominates someone that they once filibustered, a successful round of filibuster reform could remove that obstacle.

6. Deval Patrick

The Massachusetts governor is not just a successful politician, he is also a Harvard Law grad, former U.S. Court of Appeals law clerk, and former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Like Harris, Patrick would bring an elected official’s perspective to the Court, and his civil rights background would provide a counterbalance to Justice Antonin Scalia, who recently labeled the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

7. Pam Karlan

Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan is a constitutional scholar, a leading expert on voting rights and a top Supreme Court advocate. In the wake of voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, voter purges, barriers to voter registration, and other efforts to suppress voting, Professor Karlan would be an ideal candidate to restore the Supreme Court’s respect for the franchise. Additionally, Karlan is in a long-term committed relationship with a woman, so she would add this perspective to the bench as well.

8. Paul Smith

Paul Smith may be the nation’s preeminent gay rights litigator, having argued and won Lawrence v. Texas before the Supreme Court. He also argued a pair of challenges to partisan gerrymanders that were halted by the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court. As a justice himself, Smith would be the ideal candidate to write an opinion declaring such gerrymanders unconstitutional once and for all.

9. Neal Katyal

Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal has the distinction of being on the correct side of the most important constitutional issues to arise in the last two presidencies. As the Obama Administration’s top litigator, Katyal defended the Affordable Care Act in multiple courts of appeal against partisan lawsuits seeking to undermine it. And he convinced the Supreme Court to place an important limit on President Bush’s attempt to isolate Guantanamo detainees from the law in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

10. Tom Perez

Senate Republicans wasted no time in opposing Tom Perez, the Labor Secretary nominee given the task of cleaning up the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division after the Bush Administration left it in a shambles, once President Obama nominated Perez to the cabinet. Nevertheless, Perez’s background in civil rights and labor policy would help balance the conservative justices who turned their backs on Lilly Ledbetter’s right to equal pay for equal work. And, so long as Democrats control the Senate, a filibuster of Perez’s nomination could only be sustained if Senate Democrats allow it.

As Congress fails to make progress on reforming the nation’s gun laws, state legislatures have filled the void. A number of states around the country, and not just deep-blue ones, have taken steps to crack down on gun violence. Even some very conservative states have defeated National Rifle Association (NRA) supported bills that would have significantly weakened state gun laws.

Here’s a run-down of ten instances of state progress that were in some cases mere proposals as recently as this January:

1. Colorado. A purple state with a strong gun culture, Colorado nevertheless enacted universal background checks and a ban on high-capacity magazines.

2. California. Governor Jerry Brown (D) signed legislation at the beginning of May that would provide $24 million for confiscating illegally owned weapons that the police have identified, but hasn’t had the resources to seize. California is also considering thirty-odd measures strengthening the state’s gun violence prevention measures.

3. Georgia. The Georgia legislature killed a bill at the end of the last legislative session that would have allowed concealed carry in churches, courthouse, and college campuses.

4. Maryland. Maryland enacted one of the most sweeping new gun laws in the country, including an assault weapons ban, restrictions on magazine size, and a requirement that all gun purchasers get a license and submit a fingerprint sample.

5. Rhode Island. The Ocean State’s legislature is considering an omnibus gun bill, supported by its governor, Lincoln Chafee (I), that would set up a police registry of guns to better track crime guns as well as make it harder to get a concealed carry permit.

6. Delaware. In early May, Governor Jack Markell (D) signed a universal background check bill into law.

7. Wyoming. The Wyoming legislature, which can be quite hostile to gun regulation, voted down a bill authorizing teachers to carry guns.

8. New York. New York strengthened its already strong gun laws, including stricter assault weapon and high capacity magazine bans.

9. Connecticut. Connecticut also passed a comprehensive package that included universal background checks for bullets as well as guns, as well as an assault weapons ban and magazine restrictions.

10. Nevada. Just this Wednesday, the Nevada Senate passed a universal background checks bill that would require a check on all private sales.

While several states have also loosened their gun laws after Newtown — and a few advanced laws so extreme that they are almost certainly unconstitutional – the above examples prove that the NRA’s stranglehold over the gun conversation isn’t nearly as tight as some believe, and that concerted effort at the state level can have significant effects on the gun policy landscape.

But what is less known is that even those dispensaries that haven’t been targeted for federal prosecution or have thus far survived it are subject to fundamental legal obstacles to operating their business. These obstacles discourage potential marijuana distributors and growers from applying for licenses, and make it more likely that they will operate at least partially under the table and outside the legal system.

1. Medical marijuana businesses can’t open a bank account. Banks that do business with marijuana distributors are considered money launderers, so dispensaries cannot bank or access other bank services legally if they are open about their status as a marijuana dispensary. Even those who have skirted this by opening accounts in their personal names or being vague about the nature of the account have had their accounts terminated, often jumping from bank to bank. One Colorado state bank known for allowing dispensary clients terminated more than 300 accounts after the Department of Justice warned in 2011 that they would pursue money laundering charges. Without a bank account, dispensaries have no good means of even paying employees, let alone storing their money or paying their exorbitant taxes (see below). Washington State officials who contacted banks about their position said they are waiting from a statement from Attorney General Eric Holder on the federal government’s response to two ballot initiatives legalizing recreational marijuana before they reconsider their position. Some dispensaries are trying to form their own banking cooperative to skirt these restrictions.

2. Medical marijuana businesses have scant access to loans. Because of the same banking regulations that bar bank accounts, marijuana dispensaries that are open about their purpose typically can’t take out loans from traditional financial institutions or the Small Business Administration — eliminating the major sources of funding for most small businesses. But they may also have difficulty borrowing funds from nontraditional lenders, including the sorts of “angel investors” that have popped up in the industry. An Arizona ruling last year on an attempt to enforce a loan to a medical marijuana dispensary refused to enforce the loan contract, because the money was for an illegal purpose under federal law.

3. Medical marijuana entrepreneurs can’t open a credit card account, and many are blacklisted from any credit card use. “Over the past two years, Amex and other major credit card companies – including Visa and MasterCard – have distanced themselves from the medical marijuana industry, refusing to process transactions at dispensaries and closing merchant accounts for MMJ centers,” Medical Marijuana Business Daily reported last week. Now business owners are learning that they have been added to a “merchant match list,” which makes it almost impossible for that person to open an account for any other unrelated business, stifling many entrepreneurs who might want to dip their toe into the marijuana industry. This blacklist can even affect businesses in which one owner with a minority stake in the company is on the list. Without access to loans, dispensary owners who enter the business because of a passion or expertise about medical cannabis rather than financial means will be all-the-more reliant upon partners and investors, who may be deterred from entering a business that will tar their credit eligibility.

4. The IRS won’t let marijuana businesses deduct any of their business-related expenses. Although the IRS is happy to take marijuana dispensaries’ money, a tax code provision that bans any tax deductions related to “trafficking in controlled substances” has made their business very expensive. While some IRS rulings have held that expenses unrelated to marijuana distribution might be deducted, that ruling has been construed narrowly, and leaves most marijuana businesses with a hefty bill and few permissible deductions. After the owner of the largest U.S. dispensary lost his challenge to the 2011 IRS rule, he said, “I see only two outcomes here. Either this IRS assessment has to change or we go out of business. There really isn’t a middle ground for us.” Thus far, this dispensary and others continue to operate.

All of these obstacles stem from the same federal ban under the Controlled Substances Act that enables criminal prosecution or asset forfeiture against marijuana businesses, and even if federal officials stopped prosecuting dispensaries altogether, these issues would chill state attempts to make dispensation of medical and/or recreational marijuana above-board, regulated for health and safety, and taxable. All of these issues could be resolved by legislation that eliminates federal penalties for those actions that comply with state marijuana laws.

(Credit: AP)

Last November, Florida voters endured massive lines and chaotic polling places largely thanks to a barrage of election law changes pushed by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) and other GOP lawmakers. Republicans slashed the number of early voting days in half, changed ballot length restrictions to add lengthy and frivolous constitutional amendments to 12-page ballots, restricted voter registration, and tried to purge mostly minority voters from the voting rolls.

On Wednesday, Scott signed a bill to reverse his own election laws by restoring early voting days and ballot limits, among other measures.

Though Scott initially insisted he “did the right thing” by implementing these laws, vehement backlash and plummeting approval ratings prompted the governor to embrace election reforms:

The new bill extends early voting from 8 days to 14, extends early voting hours from 8 to 12 hours a day, and expands polling places to include courthouses, civic centers, stadiums, convention centers, fairgrounds and government-owned senior and community centers to keep up with crowds.

It also seeks to make ballot length more manageable by restricting constitutional amendments to a maximum of 75 words, and loosens some of the restrictions on when voters have to file provisional ballots.

It also permits county supervisors to hold early voting on the Sunday before the election, “respecting the ‘souls to the polls’ tradition of many black churches,” as reported by the Florida Current.

The bill moves back Florida’s primary elections from January to the first Tuesday allowed by Democratic and Republican National Committees to avoid penalties.

And lastly, the bill imposes $25,000 fines for failing to fix voting machines, something that reportedly snarled elections in Palm Beach County, according to the Sun Sentinel.

Shortly after the election, prominent GOP members admitted many of the new election laws intentionally tried to make it harder for Democrats to vote. These vote-suppressing efforts largely succeeded; the long lines discouraged at least 201,000 Floridians from voting, while black and Latino voters waited nearly twice as long as whites.

Sen. Mo Cowan (D-MA)

Noting that he was stunned to learn, on his arrival in the Senate, of the “60 vote majority” needed to do business in 100-member Senate, Cowan said the rules need to be fixed:

COWAN: My view on it is this: I appreciate and respect the rules and the negotiations that led to that, but it’s currently getting in the way of too much of what we’re trying to get done — and need to get done. I think that when they’re important issues, be it nominations or legislation… that we need to have a chance to have votes, get to the issues, have real debate, and make decisions. I respect the role of the minority, I don’t believe in the majority rolling over the minority, but I don’t believe that’s what you get with a 50-vote threshold.

Noting that he does not believe there is any discriminatory intent, Cowan added that the effect of Senate Republican obstruction could be preventing diversity in government — such as stalled Labor Secretary-nominee Tom Perez. He added that the 60-vote threshold is “keeping the Senate from functioning effectively and efficiently in the work the American people need [it] to do.

Listen to the audio:

Appointed to the Senate by Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA) to temporarily fill the vacant seat of Secretary of State John Kerry, Cowan brings a unique perspective: he has never run for the office and is not a candidate for election. On June 25, Bay State voters will elect a new Senator to fill the remaining 18 months of Kerry’s term. Kerry had been hesitant about cloture reform.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is reportedly considering a move prevent a minority of Senators from blocking confirmation of presidential appointees.

It is a legitimate question whether we as a state should be taking lives. Because the question is about the use of the death penalty itself, and not about Offender No. 89148, I have opted to grant a reprieve and not clemency in this case.

Hickenlooper also said Colorado’s system is flawed, citing a study that showed the death penalty was applied inconsistently. Hickenlooper’s announcement comes several months after the failure of a bill to abolish the death penalty. Ironically, the bill died after Hickenlooper suggested he might veto it, but the movement to expose Colorado’s broken death penalty system did not. In letters imploring Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, members of the NAACP exposed statistics that the three individuals on Colorado’s death row are all black, all from the same one county, and all committed their crimes before they turned 21. A group of judges lamented that Dunlap’s trial was rife with error, with Dunlap’s lawyer never even raising his history of bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies.

Hickenlooper’s grant of a reprieve rather than clemency means that John Dunlap’s execution will be on hold until another executive order, according to the Denver Post. But Hickenlooper said it was “highly unlikely” he would revisit the decision, although another governor might. The decision means that Colorado is, in effect, not imposing the death penalty, and Hickenlooper’s public opposition may lead to a revival of legislation to officially abolish it. Eighteen other states have abolished the punishment, which data shows is disproportionately and arbitrarily applied and does not deter violent crime.

Hipolito Aranda. (Credit: Newschannel 8)

Hipolito Aranda was watching the police conduct a DUI investigation on February 13th, 2010, when he was approached and frisked by Sgt. Tim Heidt. Though Aranda offered no resistance, Heidt handcuffed him, threw him to the ground, and began punching him repeatedly all around his body. The video footage corroborates this narrative of events:

Newschannel 8 Reporter Kyle Iboshi reports that, according to the internal McMinnville Police report, “Heidt did not have probable cause or evidence of a threat that would justify the initial frisk.” Moreover, “There was no visible actions on Hipolito’s part that warranted the aggressive take-down used in this situation,” and the officer’s account of the events “is extremely troubling even if not deceitful.” Heidt had accused Aranda of resisting arrest, but a jury cleared Aranda.

The ordeal was terrifying for Aranda. “I thought I was going to die,” he said. Though Aranda is currently pursuing a civil rights suit over the matter, Sgt. Heidt remains on duty.

This is the second older case of police brutality to come to public attention in recent weeks. In Berkeley, California, two police officers nearly killed a man for asking to read the ticket they were (incorrectly) assigning him before he signed it.

(Credit: AP)

JACKSON: I don’t think that the federal government has much of a role at all constitutionally, at all [in disaster relief]. Now, you may make an argument that it does. You might argue that it’s a national security issue you might argue that it weakens us in the event of some sort of national military emergency. So you can make an attenuated argument. But I think that as a constitutional matter the federal government doesn’t have a whole lot to do with that. In my view, these are things that are ultimately supposed to be handled by the states. And, so, we’ve got a big Tenth Amendment problem in our country. . . . We’ve turned the federal government into a kind of god.

Watch it:

Disaster relief is not an attempt to steal power from God. To the contrary, it is the just response of a nation sensitive to the lesson of 1 John 3:17, which reads that “if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”

It is also entirely consistent with the Constitution. The Constitution gives the United States broad authority to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Ensuring that all Americans can rebuild their lives in the wake of a major national disaster is a classic example of using federal revenues to provide for the general welfare.

While Jackson’s view of the Constitution is wrong, it is not surprising giving the range of unusual views he’s expressed in the past. Jackson believes that Planned Parenthood is “more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was.” He thinks that the original Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause, which gave slave states additional representation in the U.S. House by allowing them to count 60 percent of their slave population when congressional seats were apportioned among the states, was “an anti-slavery amendment.” He accused Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) of faking his faith. And he believes that being gay “poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of.”

As 87 percent of Nevadans support background checks, the letter avoided any mention of Heller’s vote against the Manchin-Toomey background checks compromise. Instead, the senator touted his co-sponsorship of an NRA-supported bill that claimed to strengthen background checks but would actually make it easier for mentally ill people to get guns.

I have been adamant from the beginning of the gun control debate that our current background check system needs strengthening and improving, particularly in areas that could keep guns out of the hands of felongs and the mentally ill. We need to increase submission rates of disqualifying records by state as well as close existing loopholes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). You may be interested to know, I am an original cosponsor of bipartisan legislation, the NICS Reporting Improvement Act (S.480), to strengthen our current background check system and close loopholes related to the mentally ill. This legislation provides clarity to existing law and is a common sense approach to preventing unnecessary violence.

The bill Heller refers to was drafted in consultation with the NRA and would allow patients who were involuntarily committed and treated for mental illness to pass a background check. Despite his professed support for gun control, Heller has actually voted to loosen gun laws. He has repeatedly supported a proposal to allow concealed weapons to be carried into states where they are illegal, co-sponsored two bills to make interstate gun purchases easier and to repeal Washington, D.C. gun laws. Indeed, the NRA-backed bill he’s now trying to pass off as a background checks bill would have also weakened gun laws by making it easier to buy guns across state lines. As gun sales in states with lax gun laws are a common method of evading stricter laws in other states, the bill Heller touts in his letter could very well have made gun violence worse.

Heller is not the only senator trying to dissemble on their gun control stance after voting against background checks. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) responded to an ad criticizing his vote by claiming he did vote to strengthen background checks. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) also had some help from the NRA in an ad trying to obscure her anti-background check vote.

Virginia Lt. Gov. nominee E.W. Jackson (R) (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Though the website has since been heavily scrubbed, a cached version from October 9, 2009 shows that Jackson’s group initially spelled out its “Top 7 Issues”. The second most important issue, he argued, was “to bring an end to the hyphenated American.” Jackson warned that by referring to oneself as Jewish-American or Hispanic-American, it comes “at the expense of our national unity.”

STAND FOR AN END TO THE HYPHENATED AMERICAN

It is time to bring an end to the hyphenated American. We have balkanized ourselves into islands of ethnocentrism: Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. We understand the desire of people to maintain a connection to their history and ancestry. That desire is legitimate, but not at the expense of our national unity. We are Americans with different ethnic backgrounds, but we are first and foremost Americans. Some of our forefathers came from Europe, some from Asia, India, the African continent and a host of nations around the world. If we restrict ourselves to our ethnic enclaves and ethnic identities, we deprive ourselves of the great benefits of the American experiment. It is about uniting a diverse group of people with a common love for freedom, democracy and the ideals of our nation. We are a family. We unite under one Constitution, one flag, and one common destiny. Without a single language, that ideal will become farther and farther from reality.

See a screenshot below:

Preventing Americans from acknowledging their ethnic heritage was so important to Jackson that it actually edged out abortion (3rd most important) and outlawing marriage equality (4th most important) in his list of top issues.

Jackson did deem one problem even more troubling than the hyphen, however. His number one issue was creating an “American History Month,” because “[w]e have Black History Month and Gay Pride Month, but these only serve to further balkanize us.”

(Credit: AP)

White New Yorkers make up a small minority of stop-and-frisks, which were 84 percent black and Latino residents. Despite this much higher number of minorities deemed suspicious by police, the likelihood that stopping an African American would find a weapon was half the likelihood of finding one on a white person.

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.

It’s unlikely that the appropriate lesson to take from these findings is that stops of white people should increase because they are more likely to carry weapons and drugs. Rather, they suggest that police are excessively targeting minorities. Officers may be netting more successful stops of white New Yorkers because they are only likely to stop a white person when they actually suspect that person of committing a crime. Considering one officer’s testimony that superiors explicitly directed him to target young black men, minorities are judged by a much more flexible definition of “reasonable suspicion.”

And this loose approach to the Constitution’s ban on unlawful searches and seizures is part of a larger pattern of African-Americans being targeted by police. In one incident an officer cuffed and detained a 13-year-old African American boy, the son of a former cop, for six hours because he allegedly reached into his pants’ waistband. Other cops punched and pepper-sprayed a 38-year-old veteran who was discussing Memorial Day plans with friends on a street corner. Yet another black man reported being stopped and arrested 4 times in one year on criminal trespass charges later dismissed by a judge.

In general, stop-and-frisk has proven to be remarkably ineffective; nearly 89 percent of all stops result in no charges. The city has also had to settle a surging number of civil rights lawsuits against police to the tune of $22 million in one year.

With no deputies available, the 911 dispatcher transferred the woman to the state police — but they would not come rescue the woman either. In the words of the state police dispatcher, “I don’t have anybody to send out there. You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Do you know if he’s intoxicated or anything?”

Eventually, the ex-boyfriend, a man named Michael Bellah, pried open the woman’s front door. Choked her. And raped her. After he was caught, he plead guilty to kidnapping, assault, and sex abuse.

This woman’s situation was not a tragic outlier — while Sheriff Gil Gilberson declined to comment on this specific case, he noted to Oregon Public Radio “[t]here isn’t a day go by that we don’t have another victim” due to a law enforcement deficit caused by a budget cuts that went into effect last May.

The Josephine County’s Sheriff’s Office budget was cut after the the expiration of a multi-million dollar annual federal aid payment to timber-dependent counties, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, originally passed in 2000. The federal government previously shared timber sale revenues from public lands with rural counties to offset the lack of property taxes from those lands, but as logging was reduced by 90 percent in federal lands since 1989, the aid program replaced that revenue source.

Without money from the program, the county was forced to lay off most of its deputies and close its entire major crimes division. Two of the remaining six deputies are limited to patrolling federal forest lands and a local river because of how their positions are funded.

After the cuts, Gilberson released a press statement suggesting victims of domestic violence “consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.” The Grant Pass State Police Office usually has just two officers working per shift, but has become the only resource for local law enforcement on weekends. They’ve received about three times as many calls in as in the past.

But despite these dire circumstances, yesterday Josephine County voted 51 to 49 percent against a public safety levy for more law enforcement. The levy would have raised county property taxes from 59 cents per $1,000 of property value, the lowest in Oregon, to $1.48 for the next three years. It rejected a similar property tax levy increasing the rate to $1.99 per $1,000 shortly before the initial cuts 57 to 43 percent.

While clearly, the situation in Josephine County is an extreme example of a community failing to live up to public safety needs of its residents, the community is not alone in struggling to recover from revenue lost with the expiration of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act. Nationwide more than 700 counties in 41 states benefited from the program, including 33 of the 36 counties in Oregon.

The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced since the days of slavery, one that helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since.

Yet every time the race and IQ hypothesis reclaims the public spotlight, we are caught slackjaw, always returning to the same basic debates on the same basic concepts.

The recent fracas sparked by Dr. Jason Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is a case in point. The paper is a dry thing, written for an academic audience, yet its core claim, that Latino immigrants to the United States are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native whites,” has proved proper tinder for a public firestorm. The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies is now a former Senior Policy Analyst — Heritage could not risk further tainting an immigration report it hoped would be influential by outright defending its scholar’s meditations on the possibly genetic intellectual inferiority of immigrants from Latin America.

It might seem like the book is closed on l’affaire Richwine: he’s left his job, Heritage is left with a black eye, and not a single mind has been changed about the value of research into race and IQ. But there’s still one major unanswered question.

If the dissertation was bad enough to get him fired from the Heritage Foundation, how did it earn him a degree from Harvard?

A popular answer among Richwine’s defenders is that, quite simply, it was exemplary work. Richwine’s dissertation committee was made up, by all accounts, of three eminent scholars, each widely respected in their respective fields. And it is Harvard.

But dozens of interviews with subject matter experts, Harvard graduates in Richwine’s program who overlapped with him, and members of the committee itself paint a somewhat more textured picture. Richwine’s dissertation was sloppy scholarship, relying on statistical sophistication to hide some serious conceptual errors. Yet internal accounts of Richwine’s time at Harvard suggests the august university, for the most part, let serious problems in Richwine’s research  fall through the cracks.

Richwine Goes To Harvard

By his own account, Jason Richwine came to the Harvard Kennedy School deeply fascinated with the link between race and IQ. Richwine told The Washington Examiner’s Byron York that, as an undergraduate at American University, he fell in love with Charles Murray’s work on the topic. Murray, who will become an important player in Richwine’s story later on, is one of the authors of the infamous The Bell Curve, the 1994 book whose claims about the genetic roots of the black/white IQ gap set off the most famous public food fight over race and IQ. Richwine describes Murray as “my childhood hero.”

People that knew Richwine at Harvard describe him as an introverted, but kind, man. “He was a quiet and thoughtful person,” said Anh Ngoc Tran, a contemporary of Richwine’s at Harvard who now teaches at Indiana University. “[Richwine] was friendlier to international students,” Tran said. Another contemporary of Richwine’s echoed Tran, saying Richwine was “not really all that outgoing. Always a really nice guy.”

Tran took pain to distance Richwine from accusations of racism. “I don’t think he is racist,” Tran told me. “His wife is an immigrant.”

After the first two years of coursework, PhD candidates in Public Policy at the Kennedy School move away from group classes toward individual research. That means taking comprehensive exams (“comps,” in grad student lingo) to show you’ve mastered the course material. After comps, you start work on a dissertation, a piece of original scholarship that’s supposed to demonstrate the candidate’s ability to produce research at the level expected of an expert in the field. Dissertation topics are determined in conjunction with a primary advisor, who goes on to become the “chair” of a three-person committee that determines the candidate’s fate. The topic is finalized in a formal “prospectus” outlining the research agenda.

Richwine’s chair, as listed in his dissertation, was Professor George Borjas, a prominent, if controversial, economist. A Cuban immigrant himself, Borjas was a natural fit for Richwine’s dour assessment of mass Latino immigration: he’s the nation’s leading academic immigration skeptic, famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for arguing that immigrants to the United States are likely to be unskilled drags on the US economy. One of his most influential articles, a 1987 paper called “Self-Selection and the Earnings of Immigrants,” argued that countries with more income inequality than the United States are likely to send over “low quality” immigrants— meaning people lacking the skills to march up the economic ladder — as unskilled laborers lead a more prosperous life here than in their home countries.

However much Borjas emphasized the skills, or lack thereof, of Latino immigrants in his own work, he knew and cared little about their IQs. “I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don’t really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration,” he told Slate’s Dave Weigel. “In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I’ve long believed this, I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting.”

It’s then perhaps odd that Borjas put up little resistance to Richwine’s proposed line of inquiry. “Jason had the topic fully formed in his mind before he talked to me,” he wrote via email. “I played no role in topic selection or forming the research agenda.”

This line raised eyebrows among some scholars familiar with social science dissertations. Dan Drezner is a Professor of International Politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School, an institution that’s somewhat similar to Harvard’s Kennedy School in character, who’s been following the Richwine case closely. “If I’m an advisor, and I have a student that comes to me,” Drezner said, “the last thing I would do is say ‘write this.’” They key issue is “how well formed was Richwine’s argument when he came to Borjas?” Students should come up with their own dissertation topics, Drezner said, but if an advisor didn’t sufficiently challenge them on whether it was a good, well-thought out program, that could be a problem.

What’s a “Hispanic?”

Some experts in the fields Richwine’s dissertation covered, judging from the final product, had harsh answers to Drezner’s question. “The committee was wrong to approve [Richwine's dissertation] and to accept the prospectus,” wrote Diego A. von Vacano. Von Vacano is a professor at Texas A&M University whose research focuses on Hispanic identity. After he wrote a harsh review of Richwine’s work on the academic blog The Monkey Cage, I got in touch with him to see if he could clarify the nature of his objections.

Von Vacano’s basic critique centers on Richwine’s definitions, or lack thereof, of the terms “Hispanic,” “white,” and “race.” The most grevious of Richwine’s errors lies in his account of the first: the lack of a meaningful definition of “Hispanic” dooms the dissertation’s ability to draw rigorous conclusions about the people he’s chosen to study.

There’s enormous debate about just what “Hispanic” means and who counts as one in any meaningful sense. Richwine’s third chapter, titled “Hispanic IQ,” treats this debate in the most cursory of fashions. This is the chapter’s full definition of the term Hispanic and defense of its use:

Over 56% of immigrants living in the U.S. in 2006 were Hispanic — that is, born in either Mexico (32% of total immigrants), Central American [sic] and the Caribbean (17%), or South America (7%)…Hispanics are not a monolithic group either ethnically or culturally, but the category still has real meaning. Hispanics can be of any race, but they are most often “Mestizo” — a mixture of European and Amerindian background. Mexico, for example, is 60% Mestizo (LV 2006, 241). Hispanics also share ethno-cultural tendencies that are different from the majority Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States (Huntington 2004, 253-255). Most come from Spanish-speaking nations with cultures heavily influence by Catholicism. And many Hispanics choose to identify themselves as such, as the existence of groups like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the National Council of La Raza (“the race” or “the people”), and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus readily demonstrates.

Von Vacano sees this as fatally inadequate. “Any serious work at the doctoral level on these issues (even if mainly quantitative or policy-oriented),” he told me, “requires a substantive component of analysis from the qualitative, historical, cultural, normative, and theoretical perspectives (at least one or two dissertation chapters).”

These are not merely scholarly niceties: what Richwine means by “Hispanic” is critical to the success of both of his two core arguments. First, to prove that “from the perspective of Americans alive today, the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent,” he needs to show that one can speak meaningfully about“Hispanic” IQ. Richwine needs this claim to be true for the entire third section of his dissertation, the one that spells out the dangers of low IQ Hispanic immigration, to succeed. Establishing the negative consequences of Hispanic immigration means first establishing there’s such a thing as “Hispanic immigration” in a scientifically useful sense.

Because Hispanic identity is so hotly contested among scholars of race and ethnicity, that means both providing a clear account of why people from an arbitrary set of geographic locations are homogenous enough for generalizations about them are meaningful, controlled social science. Richwine fails to do so.

First, Richwine asserts Hispanics are mostly some “Mestizo” mix of Native American and European, making them genetically similar. But in the unnerving world of race and IQ research, what mix they are matters. Richwine believes that “socioeconomic hierarchies correlate consistently with race all across the world” because some races are biologically smarter; “there are no countries,” he writes, “in which ethnic Chinese are less successful than Amerindians.” It stands to reason, on his theory, that “mixed” Hispanics with more European or  Asian DNA will be concomitantly smarter, on average, than more heavily Amerindian or African ones. But Richwine doesn’t attempt to show that the mix of racial DNA inside any one “Hispanic” subgroup is consistent enough for generalization, let alone the category as a whole.

That’s because it’s not. Even a cursory examination of research on Latin American genetics uncovers an impossibly complex genetic admixture, one that varies widely from country to country or even region to region. To take one simple example, the average percentage of identifiably African, Native American, and European DNA among Brazilians varies widely by region (although some definitions of “Hispanic” would exclude Portuguese-speaking Brazil, Richwine’s includes it). Hispanic immigrants to the United States come from a bewildering array of countries, each with its own particular internal diversity. As von Vacano puts it, “there is no literature that can meaningfully support the idea that ‘Hispanic’ is a genetic category,” let alone one that can be equated with the colonially-superimposed “Mestizo” identifier.

Second, Richwine asserts that Hispanics share a similar culture that’s distinct from so-called “Anglo” culture. Richwine’s only support for this claim is a citation of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, a book that warns of a wave of Hispanic immigration irrevocably altering American culture for the worse. Huntington’s claims about Hispanic inability to assimilate have been subjected to serious quantitative challenge, but more to the point, citing a polemic tract about immigration does not constitute explaining what the purportedly unified Hispanic culture is and why the fact that it involves a lot of Spanish-speaking and Catholicism might be seen as allowing one to make generalized claims about the group.

This is especially egregious when the scholarly consensus is that there is no obvious unified Hispanic or Latino culture. As the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture puts it, “as all the chapters [in this book] reveal, any search for a communal ‘Latin American’ culture has remained an elusive, somewhat quixotic idea.” This, again, is because Latin American countries vary widely — compare Mexico to Brazil to Costa Rica to Argentina and find extraordinary differences in wealth, social norms, political systems, and ethnic backgrounds.  Indeed, the vast diversity among “Hispanic” societies should be obvious even to someone whose only experience of these cultures involves dining out: Mexican chile rellenos are not Cubano sandwiches, which definitely are not Argentine steak platters.

Finally, Richwine notes that Hispanic immigrants to the United States have a sense of shared identity, but, again, it’s not explained why that allows one to make generalizations about group IQ, let alone the genetic component thereof. It’s just simply asserted, without any explanation of who shares the shared identity — Cuban-Americans, for example, have a different view of their American experience than Salvadoreans — and why that’s relevant.

Why do definitions matter if Richwine succeeds in showing a deep, persistent difference between so-called “Hispanics” and “whites?” Aside from the fact that it makes it impossible to figure out the scope of the dissertation (are Mexicans of largely European descent likely to have low IQs? What about African-descendent Brazilians?), consider a simple analogy. Suppose I test people who like to wear red hats and people who like to wear blue hats, and find the red-hatters have consistently higher IQ scores than blue-hatters. It’s highly unlikely that hat preference itself explains the gap; more likely, it’s something else that’s correlated with being a red-hatter or a blue-hatter or potentially a statistical artifact — a consequence of a few really smart red-hatters or some spectacularly dumb blue-hatters.

Substitute “white” and “Hispanic” and the point becomes clear. Without a proper definition of what he means when he says Hispanic, we have no way of evaluating the role that immigrants’ “Hispanicness” — whether that means shared genes, culture, or national background — plays in determining their IQ. Put differently, in order to know whether and how being Hispanic matters for IQ, we need to know what it means to be Hispanic. That, in turn, makes it impossible to evaluate how meaningful Richwine’s conclusions about the persistence of the IQ gap are or how they apply to any particular group of immigrants.

Someone may disagree with these arguments. But, according to von Vacano, they require a response. Richwine simply pretends they do not exist.

Harvard On The Potomac

After setting off down his research path, Richwine needed to assemble a committee to evaluate his work. Dissertation committees are best thought of as a sort of Venn diagram of expertise. A dissertation is supposed to be original scholarship, work that, once completed, makes its author a leading expert on a very specific topic. No one professor is likely to know as much about every subfield used to get to the candidate’s very specific conclusion, so committee members are supposed to fill in each others’ expertise gaps.

Borjas, as we’ve seen, filled the largest part of the Venn Diagram given his expertise on the economics of Latino immigration. The second committee member, Richard Zeckhauser, is an economic polymath who’s published on an impressively bewildering array of public policy topics. The thread that ties them together is his interest in sophisticated quantitative, economic analysis of public policy issues, making him ideally suited to check Richwine’s complex econometric and statistical work.

There was a consensus among academics I spoke to that the analysis of immigrant IQ test data and other aptitude metrics, as well as his economic model of the effects of low IQ immigration — the quantitative work, essentially — were the best parts of Richwine’s dissertation.

“Jason’s empirical work was careful,” Zeckhauser wrote.  “Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.” Borjas has made similar remarks, suggesting “none of the members of the committee would have signed off on it if they thought that it was shoddy empirical work.”

With Borjas and Zeckhauser on board, at least one critical area of Richwine’s Venn diagram remained unfilled: race and IQ. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s where the story gets complicated.

Richwine did not do his dissertation research at Harvard. That’s actually fairly common in the Public Policy PhD program. One source familiar with the program told me that students often only have university-provided stipends for the first two and a half years of the program; after that, they work as teaching assistants or find external grants or scholarships to make up the money gap.

That’s when Richwine went off to study at with his “childhood hero” Murray at the American Enterprise Institute. The mechanics of how Richwine ended up with a fellowship at the prestigious conservative think tank aren’t quite clear; Richwine remembers a meeting with Murray in Cambridge leading to his eventual post at AEI, but Murray told me he doesn’t quite recall the process by which Richwine made it to Washington. It doesn’t surprise him, though, that Richwine was thrilled to be at AEI. “I’m Charles Murray,” he said. “I’m sure that Jason wanted to work with me.”

“I mean, come on.”

Murray’s work, particularly The Bell Curve, features prominently in Richwine’s dissertation. Richwine calls Murray “my primary advisor,” noting that “no one was more influential than Charles Murray” on the final product. Steven Durlauf, an economic methodologist at the University of Wisconsin familiar with IQ research, reads this as an acknowledgement that Murray “was de facto the main advisor” in place of Borjas. But even then, Murray didn’t see Richwine in person all that frequently. “I don’t have an office [at AEI]. They pay my salary,” but he generally works remotely.

Murray certainly had more of an influence on Richwine than the student’s third formal advisor, Christopher “Sandy” Jencks. A longtime veteran of the race and IQ wars, Jencks’ position in the controversy is quite different from Murray’s. Unlike Murray, a “hereditarian” who believes genes explain a great deal of the demonstrated gap in IQ scores between black and white students, Jencks is an “environmentalist” who believes circumstances, not genetics, basically explain the score gap.

“My views about both test scores and politics are very different from [Richwine's],” Jencks told me archly.

Jencks was a “late addition” to the committee, meaning, he clarified, that he didn’t start working on Richwine’s dissertation till after he left for Washington. “He was at AEI at the time,” Jencks said, “so I did not see much of him.” The professor’s role was also fairly limited: “I was asked to serve as a third reader, read a draft, and made extensive comments about what should be done to improve it.” But, as Jencks remembers it, Richwine didn’t heed all of his advice: “He made some of the changes but not others.”

Depending on the importance of these criticisms, this could be a serious problem. “If you’re on the dissertation committee, and you say ‘you’ve gotta change this, this, and this,’ and the student doesn’t do it,” Professor Drezner told me, “then that is a red flag.”

Jencks didn’t clarify exactly what his criticisms were. But independent review of the section on race and IQ suggested some serious problems with Richwine’s approach.

IQ Isn’t Everything (Or Even Close)

“No academic institution would hire him based on this,” said Professor Warigia Bowman.

Bowman graduated from the Kennedy School Public Policy PhD program in the same year that Richwine did. She knew all of his advisors, some quite well: she was Borjas’ teaching fellow in an introductory economics course, studied analytic methods with Zeckhauser, and had encountered Jencks in passing. Bowman has the utmost respect for all of them.

“They’re extremely generous people, they’ve always been kind to me…they’re known internationally as academic scholars.”

But she thinks that, in this case, they missed some serious errors. “I can only imagine that they were so dazzled by the empirics that they overlooked many of the flaws in the text.” Essentially, the quality of mathematical and statistical analysis in Richwine’s work hid some major conceptual shortcomings in his treatment of IQ.

Bowman, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service who specializes in African Science and Technology policy, is close to this debate. An attorney as well as a scholar, she worked on immigration law before becoming an academic. She’s also, in her words, “an African-American woman who’s the child of an immigrant of African descent.”

Her basic point is that Richwine’s treatment of his opponents, particularly critics of Murray’s work, is “selective, narrow, and cherry-picked.” For instance, she notes, Richwine cites a 1996 American Psychological Association (APA) report called Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns as representative of a “general consensus” about the “fundamentals” of IQ, but fails to cite or respond to subsequent criticism of the APA report by relevant experts.

This is a particularly troubling omission. Professor Diane F. Halpern is the only person to have coauthored both the 1996 report and a 2012 paper attempting to revise its conclusions to reflect the last 15 years of research on intelligence. Halpern isn’t a stranger to taking controversial positions on genes and intelligence: in her book “Sex Differences and Cognitive Abilities,” she wrote that there is “good evidence that biological sex differences play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences.”

Yet recent research has swayed her in the opposite direction on the biology of intelligence. “It seems safe to conclude that low socioeconomic status limits genetic contributions to intelligence, which means that poor children do not develop their full genetic potential,” she wrote, “a finding that took me some time to accept and understand.”

Some of the most persuasive research supporting this new consensus comes from Professor Eric Turkheimer. Turkheimer and his colleagues conducted several analyses of data on twins, perhaps most famously in a 2003 study that analyzed twin performance on IQ tests using a model that separated out genetic and environmental differences inside and between pairs and then mapped the results onto the soci-economic status of the children.  Turkheimer and company found that among poor twins, virtually no variation in IQ could be attributed to inherited traits, but among wealthier ones, a significant portion was. This suggests that poverty and material deprivation uniquely overwhelm any genetic component to IQ, artificially depressing IQ among disadvantaged children. Turkheimer’s research is supported by a wealth of direct evidence about the way in which stress and pollution in early childhood can stunt brain development.

Richwine doesn’t cite Turkheimer’s research. Though he’s forced to concede that similar work has demonstrated “environmental factors significantly affect IQ development when the environment is dire,” he dismisses this potentially damning critique of his persistent IQ gap — after all, most Hispanic immigrants to the United States are from far poorer countries — by saying there’s nothing you can do to fix a damaged IQ. Citing Murray and several other “hereditarian scholars, he suggests that all interventions to raise IQ have been proven to have no meaningful long term effects.

“That’s mistaken,” says Professor Richard Nisbett.

Nisbett is one of the world’s leading experts on intelligence. A co-author of the “new consensus” paper with Halpern, he’s well positioned to comment on the academic appropriateness of Richwine’s omissions (Richwine wrote a strident, but genial, critique of Nisbett’s 2009 book. Nisbett appeared unaware of this review until I mentioned it after our substantive conversation).

Nisbett believes the evidence amassed in recent years that IQ can be improved is overwhelming. “There are lots of interventions for very young children that increase IQ enormously,” he says. Though “the gains [in IQ test results] typically fade,” as Richwine suggests, “the very best interventions [to improve IQ] have colossal effects” for the rest of a child’s life.

He rattled off an impressive list of findings: these interventions “reduce by half the likelihood of being put back a grade in school…they increase the likelihood of graduating high school by about 20 percent, and they increase the likelihood of four year college by a factor of three. They increase the likelihood of making over two thousand dollars a month by a factor of four and they reduce by half the likelihood of being on welfare as an adult.” So even if the scores on IQ tests don’t change all that much down the line, the benefit of raising IQ scores at the right time in a child’s life appears to be enormous.

So a deep body of work since 1995 suggests IQ either is being raised permanently by these interventions in a way that isn’t showing up on tests, or IQ doesn’t matter nearly as much as Richwine thinks. But instead of grappling with this work, which obviously presents a serious challenge to his core thesis that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children,” Richwine is mostly content to outsource his conclusion to Charles Murray’s view circa 1994.

But what about Richwine’s dire warnings about an America plagued by an influx of low-IQ people? Richwine blames low IQ for everything from high crime rates among young “Hispanics” to increased rates of social distrust between Americans to labor market disruptions. In one particularly cringe inducing section, he posits that the reason for Hispanic “underclass” poverty is a combination of welfare-induced laziness (a point he takes as given, citing only Murray in support and no dissenting views) and low IQ.

Showing that low IQ immigration would be likely to have any one of those consequences would be a difficult scholarly accomplishment, but Richwine’s seeming ambition to make a comprehensive case against mass immigration proved his undoing. In prioritizing breadth over depth, Richwine skated over a wealth of research throwing up a significant roadblock for his conclusions: the question of how much IQ matters for life outcomes.

On the basis of several relatively crude correlations, Richwine treats a person’s IQ as an almost-perfect guide to someone’s prospects for success in life, relying heavily, once again, on Murray’s work in The Bell Curve. While it’s clear that the sort of intelligence IQ measures matters, particularly when you’re comparing two people from similar backgrounds (the higher IQ sibling in a pair, for example, is likely to do better), there’s simply no reason to think IQ matters enough to provide the juice for sweeping theories about the life prospects of entire groups of immigrants.

“There was no excuse for saying that kind of thing in 2009,” Nisbett said.

James Heckman would likely agree. Professor Heckman, an eminent economist at the University of Chicago who worked with Borjas when he was a post-doctoral fellow there, is an expert on the role that intelligence and other traits play in helping people succeed. He wrote a paper with Tim Kautz last year called, “Hard Evidence of Soft Skills,” reviewing the last several decades of research on the topic. As you might guess from the title, it’s not good for Richwine.

Experts generally think that, roughly, a “Big Five” set of psychological traits — Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — are key predictors of how well someone will do in life in terms of income, college graduation and so on. These traits can matter as much or more than IQ on some measures: a 2006 paper by Heckman and others found that personality tests were, statistically speaking, better predictors of career choice, criminality, and teen pregnancy (among other important things) than “cognitive” metrics like IQ scores.

These findings make intuitive sense. No matter how good your brain is at crunching numbers, you can still make bad choices if you’re lazy, anti-social, or overly neurotic. Conversely, people who work hard and well with others don’t have to be cognitive geniuses to succeed. As Nisbett told me, “there are prominent people with IQs in the 90s.”

The research on personality helps explain a puzzle I raised earlier: why do early childhood interventions, as Nisbett says, appear to improve children’s chances in life over the long term while only providing a temporary boost in IQ scores? As it turns out, you can teach kids to work harder or get along better with others. Heckman summarizes a number of studies to make this point, but perhaps the clearest were two studies where children were tasked with accomplishing a series of attention-heavy computer tests. They found higher conscientiousness scores among the kids who were given these tasks than a control group. Once again, more advantaged, better educated kids have a huge leg up.

On the basis of this research, Heckman finds Richwine’s attempt to use IQ to predict the consequences of Hispanic immigration beyond outdated. “Hispanics have an amazing work ethic…and they are achievement oriented,” Heckman wrote, in a statement that admittedly smacks of some stereotyping of its own. Richwine’s argument “sounds like a worn out restatement of eugenics from 100 years ago.”

Heckman’s view is and has been the dominant one for quite some time. “IQ fundamentalists,” a term Nisbett steals from Malcolm Gladwell, just are “not well informed” about what most economists and psychologists think about habits of mind and personality that make people succeed. They operate out of “a silo,” the same one from which Jason Richwine took the grain he used to make his meal.

These critiques hardly exhaust the criticisms one could level at Richwine’s treatment of Hispanics and IQ. We could get into the fact that Richwine posits a partially-genetically lower Hispanic IQ despite the fact that there’s not a single study of the role genes play in “Hispanic” IQ scores, let alone one that supports Richwine’s theory. We could get into the fact that his samples of Hispanic immigrants are rather small, leading him to supplement with national-level estimations of Hispanic IQ — principally from Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen — that rely on small, outdated, and culturally biased datasets that oftentimes aren’t even from the relevant country, divined instead from the “known IQs” of a country’s “racial groups.” And even that terrible data, according to The American Conservative publisher Ron Unz, doesn’t itself support the idea that Hispanics have lower IQs.

But the point is clear enough. Whether or not you think Richwine’s conclusions about Hispanics and IQ are defensible — and the relevant research suggests that they are not — it’s clear that he didn’t defend them well enough.

Beyond Richwine

Richwine finished his dissertation in his fourth year at Harvard, while he was working out of AEI. That’s not unheard of, but it’s faster than the Kennedy School average. “It can be done with some sacrifice to quality or depth,” one Kennedy School alum told me.

There were ample opportunities to revise his conclusions, beyond the normal give-and-take advising process Borjas described when we corresponded about Richwine. All Kennedy School Public Policy PhD students are given a chance to revise a full draft of the dissertation before final approval; in some instances, one source familiar with the process told me, they get “sent back to the drawing board.”

It’s unclear what happened at this stage. Richwine could not be reached for comment, and his professors won’t say. “I feel extremely uncomfortable disclosing personal and critical advice that I gave Jason or any other student in the privacy of my office,” Borjas said.

But here’s what we do know. Jason Richwine received a PhD from Harvard University for sub-standard research, work that makes strong assertions on a charged topic based on poorly defined concepts, incomplete and misleading summaries of opposing arguments, and bald analytic overreaches.

Is this enough to say Harvard was wrong to award him his dissertation? While some, like von Vacano, say yes, others urge more caution. Professor Durlauf, for one, says “the dissertation committee members should be presumed to have acted in good faith.”

There’s no reason to believe they didn’t. Every independent expert who wanted to speak on the topic praised the program. “Harvard’s Kennedy School is a very serious place and has trained some outstanding scholars,” said Professor Dan Black at the University of Chicago. “I hold their Ph.D. program in very high regard.”

The same went for his committee members. Even those harshly critical of Richwine’s dissertation agreed they were kind people and highly-regarded scholars.

And as for Richwine, the overwhelming sense you get from reading his work and speaking to his acquaintances is that he was, as odd as this sounds, a well-intentioned naïf. We’ve all met the type: someone so airily focused on their own passions and interests (in Richwine’s case, Murray-style hereditarian work on race and IQ) that they miss the broader social forest for the trees.

“I think what happened was that he tried to make an academic argument but did not foresee this [racism] problem,” his friend, Professor Tran, told me.

Whatever one thinks about Harvard or Richwine, the real lesson here goes beyond both of them.

Even if Richwine’s dissertation, despite all of its errors and omissions, was “good enough” to earn a passing mark, it’s emphatically not “good enough” to make a real contribution to our knowledge about the intersection between race and IQ. The scholarly errors in his research are too pervasive and severe.

Beyond the failure of craft, however, is the serious harm that can result from quasi-eugenic works masquerading as serious research. Alleging that, as a group, an enormous percentage of Americans are and always will be dumber than their fellow citizens isn’t just normal academic inquiry. Richwine bemoans the lack of “social trust” purportedly created by American diversity, but few things could undermine the shared bonds of citizenship more than widespread belief among one “race” that others are so unintelligent that more of them can be let into the country.

This isn’t a theoretical point. Throughout American history, the so-called science of race and IQ has been used by the powerful to demarcate “good” citizens and separate them from the “dangerous” ones. Minorities and minority immigrants in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, as Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates by simply quoting the words of anti-immigrant advocates against themselves. Much as Richwine may sound like a disinterested scholar, his work does not occur in a political or social vacuum. His own policy recommendations to limit immigration to high-IQ individuals proves it.

It is the case that, on some tests of intelligence, there are demonstrated gaps between different groups of Americans, particularly ones identified as “black” and “white.” As we’ve seen, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests these broad groups have little do with “race” simpliciter and much more to do with the environments people of certain races find themselves in. These findings underscore that careful scholarship on the sources of this gap, like Richard Nisbett’s or Christopher Jencks’, is legitimate academic inquiry and should be vigorously protected as such.

But this field is no place for dilettantes. The costs of being wrong are too high, the fearful forces fueled too powerful for race and IQ research to be judged like normal work. There needs to be a premium on conceptual precision and empirical accuracy over and above standard operating procedure, even (or perhaps especially) at a place as esteemed as Harvard. Anyone who wants to work in this area should be set to a higher standard, asked to explain what “race” means and whether it’s really what matters when we talk about IQ. It’s a bar Jason Richwine’s simplistic research never would have cleared.

Sometimes, “good enough” isn’t good enough.

In a second analysis, two antitrust lawyers point to the “scant recognition” of the costs imposed on attorneys, courts, and experts when new decisions make the requirements at each stage of litigation increasingly more onerous, meaning these new barriers and corporate-driven “tort reform” make the legal system more expensive. J. Douglas Richards and Michael Eisenkraft write:

Contrary to widely propagated but fictitious notions unlike many corporate defendants and most corporate defense counsel, plaintiffs generally want to get their case before a fact-finder as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Helping them attain this end without repetitive prior evaluations of a case’s merits would promote judicial efficiency and reduce litigation expenses for all parties as well as for the courts.

In spite of these findings and increasingly business-friendly rulings both at the Supreme Court and in the state courts, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came out with a study finding that the U.S. “liability system” is the most expensive of 13 countries analyzed because of so-called “lawsuit abuse” in which too many claims are filed that cost too much.

While this Chamber study was painted in a Corporate Counsel report as ranking the U.S. legal system overall the most costly, its only measure is the cost of liability insurance for businesses. The study seems to acknowledge that these costs are simply “liability costs” that affect businesses. But whether the Chamber is griping about costs to the legal system or costs to businesses, recent statistics show that individuals filing tort lawsuits that the Chamber has dubbed “frivolous” in a long-running PR campaign are not to blame. Statistics from the National Center for State Courts show that between 1999 and 2008, the tort caseload decreased by 25 percent, while the number of contract cases – primarily cases between one business and another – spiked by 63 percent.

(Credit: National Center for State Courts)

As of 2008, the number of incoming contract cases was six times the number of tort cases. This means that it is actually other businesses that are filing more cases against each other, and potentially (though not necessarily) driving up their own price of liability insurance. So-called “tort reform” movements in the states that seek to limit corporate liability and cap damage amounts rely upon the assumption that frivolous civil lawsuits alleging injuries and wrongdoing flood our courts. But it is actually business-to-business cases whose numbers are growing.

There are no doubt other factors that make our legal system more expensive, as is pointed out by the Chamber’s study. The costs of our common law system, for example, in which each case is argued on the basis of precedent and lawyers are required to navigate an impenetrable web of case law and statutes, make the costs of legal counsel sometimes astronomical. And, as compared to the European countries with more robust social safety nets, Americans must turn to the court system to recover for more types of losses (for example, in countries where health care is public, private corporations do not have liability in that area).

But however expensive an increasingly onerous litigation system is for businesses, it is that much more expensive for individuals, particularly when procedural hurdles and damage caps prevent them from ever recovering their losses.

A measure labeled the “Merry Christmas bill,” which is currently awaiting Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) signature, provides that public school staff may “offer traditional greetings” including “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” to their students, and it permits school districts to “display on school property scenes or symbols associated with traditional winter celebrations, including a menorah or a Christmas image such as a nativity scene or Christmas tree” so long as the display includes either a “secular scene” or symbols from more than one faith. The bill’s lead sponsors also put up a website promoting the bill, where they warn about a world where children ask “Daddy, why do we have a Christmas tree at home and a Holiday tree at school?”

Religious displays that merely comply with the minimum requirements of this bill are likely unconstitutional under existing law — although the law in this space is quite garbled. Although the Supreme Court did uphold a government-sponsored display that included a nativity scene in its 5-4 decision in Lynch v. Donnelly, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast the key fifth vote upholding that display, and her opinion made clear that government cannot take action whose “actual purpose is to endorse or disapprove of religion” or which “conveys a message of endorsement or disapproval.” Subsequent decisions make clear that a religious displays which violate the Constitution do not always cease to do so just because they appear alongside non-religious icons. A crucifix is still a crucifix, even if it is displayed next to the Golden Arches.

Yesterday, however, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could easily give Texas free reign to tear down much of the wall between separation of church and state. Admittedly, conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy has balked in the past at efforts to make public school students to attend religious ceremonies, so it is possible that he would balk at similar efforts by public schools to endorse a religious viewpoint. At the very least, however, the law is likely going to become much more permissive of lawmakers who wish the government to broadcast their religious beliefs to others.

• All three people on death row are black men. In a state that is only 4.3% African American, Colorado’s death row is 100% African American.
• All three men on death are from the same one county, out of Colorado’s 64.
• All three men committed their crime when they were under the age of 21.
• Two law professors who studied Colorado’s application of the death penalty concluded it was unconstitutional, after finding that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in less than one percent of the cases where it is an option, and that the state failed to set “clear statutory standards for distinguishing between the few who are executed and the many who commit murder.”

“It appears that race, geography and youth largely determines who gets the death penalty in Colorado,” wrote a group of NAACP leaders in a letter urging Gov. Hickenlooper to grant clemency. They note that not a single black juror served on the panel that sentenced Dunlap to death.

In addition to the injustices that define the Colorado system, a group of former Colorado judges also point out that Dunlap’s bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies were not even mentioned at trial. In fact, according to their letter, Dunlap’s lawyer told the jury that there was no explanation for his violence.

The judges add that “no clear evidence exists that the death penalty deters violent crime. What it does in our current system, as in this case, is to drain our judicial system of millions of dollars as mandatory appeals drag on for decades.” Studies have shown that the death penalty does not lower the homicide rate. In fact, the murder rate is lower in states without the death penalty. Hickenlooper says he continues to wrestle with the death penalty, and whether to commute Dunlap’s sentence.