Monthly Archives: December 2004

UMass Law Dean tees off on Harvard over plagiarism

Posted on by
Reply

Lawrence R. Velvel, the dean of the University of Massachusetts Law School, lays the wood to Harvard over its handling of the recent plagiarism of Harvard professors Laurence Tribe and Charles Ogletree. The entire piece is hard-hitting academic criticism at its best, and here is a snippet to arouse your interest in reading the rest:

The continued silence of [Harvard] President Summers and Dean Kagan gives wings to what until recently has been only a slight suspicion. It promotes the idea that they are simply saying nothing — are lying low — in the hope that the story will simply disappear with time. They are, after all, old Washington hands. They cannot help but be familiar with the two-day-wonder nature of the media. They cannot fail to know, that is, that generally speaking the press jumps on a story for one or two days and then forgets about it as reporters and anchormen turn to and jump on other stories. They know that the febrile minds of the press, minds based not on principle but on sensationalism and the new new thing, are usually unable to stick with something for longer than 48 hours.
So our flagship university, like the rest of American society, which it purports to lead by example, appears to be condoning dishonesty instead of punishing it in clear, public and no uncertain terms. Bravo President Summers. Bravo Dean Kagan. Your failure to act accords with the dishonesty that is rampant in society today. And the actions of a flagship should accord with those of the society it leads, shouldn?t they?

Care to respond, Harvard?

New Orleans attorney accused of embezzling $20 million

Posted on by
1

Jamie Perdigao, a former partner with the New Orleans office of Adams & Reese, has been accused of embezzling $20 million. Read about the case here.

Updating the Yukos case — TRO hearing proceeding

Posted on by
Reply

On the heels of Yukos’ chapter 11 filing late Tuesday in a Houston, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Letitia Clark will continue hearing testimony on Yukos’ request for a temporary restraining order this morning. The TRO request is Yukos’ last ditch attempt to create a some type of legal impediment to the Russian government’s scheduled auction of Yukos’ primary oil and gas unit this Sunday.
The Russian government has already announced that it intends to proceed with the auction regardless of the outcome of the TRO hearing. However, my sense is that Yukos’ real intent in pursuing the TRO is to create hesitation in the business planning of Western financial institutions that may be planning on financing an acquisition of the Yukos’ unit in Sunday’s auction. Yukos has named a number of those financial institutions as defendants in the lawsuit in which it is seeking the TRO.
The threshold issue in the Yukos’ case is whether a U.S. Bankruptcy Court has jurisdiction because nearly all of Yukos’s assets and most of its creditors are outside the United States. In the court hearing yesterday, Yukos’ attorneys stated that Yukos did not file for bankruptcy protection in Russia because the company fears it would not get a fair hearing there. Although that it probably correct, that is not a basis for jurisdiction in an American federal court. Moreover, lawyers for various defendants pointed out yesterday that Yukos successfully argued in obtaining dismissal of a federal lawsuit two years ago that Yukos had virtually no ties to Texas.
Yukos countered by contending that it has a greater stake in Texas and the United States now. Yukos contended that it is U.S. investors own more than 10% of the company and that Yukos has about $10 million in domestic banks. Moreover, Yukos’ chief financial officer is now working out of his Houston home after fleeing Russia because of government intimidation, although I doubt that making Yukos a home-based business in Houston will have any effect on Judge Clark’s decision on jurisdiction.
The sale of Yukos’ main oil and gas unit — Yuganskneftegaz, but thankfully nicknamed “Yugansk” — is the latest chapter in Yukos’ ordeal with the Russian government over the past year and a half. The company’s troubles — which include an ongoing criminal corruption case against its former CEO and main shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky — is part of a campaign by the Kremlin to deter Russia’s new wealthy capitalists from opposing the Putin government and to regain government control over strategic assets that were privatized during the demise of Russia’s communist economic system in the early 1990s (see well-time Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed here). Given the reduction in Yukos’ equity value during the past year and a half, the Russian government’s handling of Yukos is likely to have a lingering effect on Western capital investment in Russia, which the Russian government still desperately needed.
During the hearing on Wednesday, Judge Clark told Yukos lawyers that they would have to establish in the TRO hearing that the Russian government was attempting to to undervalue Yugansk in the auction, and commented that, for starters, Yukos should be prepared to show that that Yugansk is worth at least twice the $8.6 billion starting price that the Russian government has established for the auction.
Longtime Houston bankruptcy lawyer Hugh Ray, who is representing Deutsche Bank AG (which is financing Gazprom’s bid for Yugansk), generated chuckles in the courtroom yesterday when he observed that Yukos’s chapter 11 filing and request for a TRO is the equivalent of a “legal Hail Mary.”

Russian oil giant files chapter 11 in Houston

Posted on by
Reply

The Russian Government is being challenged with the rule of law, United States Bankruptcy Code style.
In a stunning development, embattled Russian oil giant Yukos has filed a chapter 11 case in Houston late Tuesday and requested a temporary restraining order against the Russian government’s auction of its main production unit that is currently scheduled for this Sunday.
H’mm. How would you like to try and enforce that TRO?
Here are earlier posts on the problems that Yukos has been experiencing with the Russian government. On one hand, Yukos’ defenders claim that the Russian government’s campaign against Yukos and its owners — particularly jailed CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky — is an effort to silence political opposition to Russian president Vladimir Putin, while Putin and his supporters claim that the government is simply cracking down on Yukos because of shady bookkeeping and corruption. Mr. Khodorkovsky has been in jail over a year and is currently being tried in Russia on charges of fraud and tax evasion.
Russian tax authorities claim that Yukos owes the government a total of $27.8 billion in unpaid taxes, so the government is auctioning Yukos’ subsidiary Yuganskneftegaz (how’s that for mouthfu?) — which produces about 60% of Yukos’ oil production — on Sunday to pay at least a portion of the indebtedness. Yukos supporters contend that the government auction is a sham that is intended to transfer the unit to a government favored company such as state gas giant Gazprom. The starting price for the auction is $8.6 billion.
In its initial chapter 11 pleadings, Yukos claimed that its total assets are worth approximately $12.25 billion and that its total debts were about $30.75 billion.
The case information for the chapter 11 case is case no. 04-47742, Yukos Oil Company, Debtor and is pending before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Letitia Z. Clark. A hearing on Yukos’ request for the temporary restraining order is scheduled for 11:15 a.m. this morning in Houston. Zack Clement of Fulbright & Jaworski is representing Yukos.

Thinking about football statistics

Posted on by
Reply

While Bill James and his Sabermetrian disciples revolutionized analysis of baseball over the past generation, no similar movement took place in regard to analysis of football. However, as this NY Times article reports, football at the highest levels is increasingly embracing Sabermetric principles:

Now the sabermetric revolution may be gaining a toehold in football as well. And here too the center of the revolution can be found in Massachusetts, where Coach Bill Belichick has led the New England Patriots to victories in two of the last three Super Bowls.
Belichick is known for his unorthodox strategies: being more willing than most to not punt on fourth down; running the ball far more than average in certain crucial situations; and eschewing two-point-conversion attempts in situations when orthodox doctrine recommends them.
Not coincidentally, experts in the world of football statistical analysis endorse all these strategies. For example, David Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, published a working paper arguing that conventional football wisdom led to far too much punting. Romer analyzed thousands of plays and calculated the chance of scoring from any position on the field. Based on that, he gauged the relative worth of the field position gained by punting against the lost opportunity to score. Romer found that football coaches punt far more than they ought to — perhaps acting out of fear of the worst outcome (going for it on fourth down and failing), rather than rationally balancing risk and reward.
Romer’s paper, “It’s Fourth Down and What Does the Bellman Equation Say? A Dynamic Programming Analysis of Football Strategy,” is far from light reading, so it came as a shock to Romer when he learned that Belichick, who was an economics major at Wesleyan University, had read it.

The main thrust in football statistical analysis is the development of a metric known as “defense-adjusted value over average,” or “DVOA.” The statistic takes into account that not all yards gained in football are created equal. For example, gaining 5 yards on third down and 4 is more beneficial, on average, than gaining eight yards on third and 10. Aaron Schatz over at FootballOutsiders.com is doing the best analysis with DVOA:

Just as it is in baseball sabermetrics, context is crucial to Schatz’s analysis. Schatz rates every play a team runs by comparing it with the league average performance for plays in as close to that situation as possible. In Schatz’s analysis, the relative success of a play is determined by, among other things, the down and distance, the current score, the field position and the opponent’s strength. DVOA, in short, is an attempt to create a tool of analysis for football similar to such Jamesian baseball statistics as offensive winning percentage, runs created and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage).

Meanwhile, the lack of refined football statistics obscures just how phenomenal a season Peyton Manning this seasons. Although Manning has received a fair amount of publicity over the fact that he will break Dan Marino‘s record of 48 touchdown passes in a season, Allen St. John in this Wall Street Journal ($) piece observes that Mannings’ excellence is better reflected by another key passing statistic — yards per pass:

For pro quarterbacks there’s no statistical Holy Grail. The conventional milestones Mr. Manning is approaching don’t quite resonate. We have developed a benchmark of our own that should make watching the rest of Mr. Manning’s historical season all the more compelling.

10 Yards per Attempt: What’s the essence of football? Almost every time the referee spots the ball on first down, a team has one goal — move the ball 10 yards and earn another set of downs. In a game of variables, it’s the one near-universal. By the Numbers has long touted YPA as the game’s most revealing passing stat because it factors in all the qualities that a great quarterback needs. Accuracy is important, but so is the ability to go deep.
And 10 yards per attempt is near perfection. It means that almost every time a quarterback throws, the linesmen move the chains. And while it’s been achieved in the past by greats like Sid Luckman and Otto Graham, it’s a goal that has become elusive in the modern NFL. Mr. Manning’s YPA of 9.41 is the best single-season mark of any post-merger quarterback with more than 350 attempts in a season. Indeed, just topping nine yards per toss puts Mr. Manning in some pretty heady company. Only four other post-merger QBs have been able to top nine yards per throw for a full season, and three of them made the Super Bowl in the year they did it.

The three Super Bowl QB’s who topped nine yards per pass were Marino, Joe Montana, and Boomer Esaison. Who was the other quarterback who averaged more than nine yards per pass in a season?
Lynn Dickey of the Packers in 1983!

A Fight at the Opera

Posted on by
Reply

Herbert Breslin became master tenor Luciano Pavarotti‘s publicist in 1967 and ultimately dumped Placido Domingo from his client list so that he could become Pavarotti’s manager. He lasted as Pavarotti’s manager for 35 years.
However, now Mr. Breslin is Mr. Pavarotti’s ex-manager, and he has written a book about Pavarotti that is the subject of this hilarious NY Times Book Review by Jane and Michael Stein. Here are a couple of delicious snippets:

As Pavarotti got bigger in every way, Breslin’s adoration shrank. By the time of the Three Tenors, a pop phenomenon engineered not by Breslin but by the impresario Tibor Rudas, Breslin was miserable. “A big, big, big mistake” is how he describes Pavarotti’s original deal to sing with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras for charity, lamenting that “Once, I had been Luciano’s creator. . . . Now I had been reduced to his foil. My role was to act as a buffer and, most important, to get him more money.” Finally he bemoans that “managing an artist can be like serving a life sentence in Alcatraz.”

And what of Pavarotti’s legendary appetite?:

Gluttony is a big theme in Breslin’s demystification. “It’s not just that he likes to eat,” he snipes. “He loves to smell food, to touch food, to prepare food, to think about food, to talk about food. When he comes into a room, he begins sniffing like a dog, and his first question is, ‘What smells so good?'” We are treated to scenes of him using a tablespoon to gobble up caviar to the point of nausea and of his “swaying belly flowing over the edge of the chaise longue.”

Not only is Pavarotti a pig, but he has bad taste, and his house in Modena “looks like something on Queens Boulevard, crammed with trinkets, tchotchkes, anything and everything.” When Pavarotti falls in love with the decor of his suite at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, he makes Breslin buy all the furniture, drapes and bedspread, and ship it to Modena. “It looks like a big blood clot,” Breslin observes.

Read the entire review. What a hoot!

“Million Dollar Baby”

Posted on by
Reply

Clint Eastwood’s new movie is getting rave reviews. Here is the NY Times review and Roger Ebert’s is here.

Jumping to conclusions on steroid use in MLB

Posted on by
Reply

Will Carroll is an expert in sports medicine who writes a column for Baseball Prospectus($) regarding injuries to baseball players. Following up on thoughts expressed in this earlier post, Mr. Carroll notes in this NY Times op-ed that, from a clinical perspective, it is far too early to jump to the conclusion that Barry Bonds‘ phenomenal performance over the past several seasons is attributable to steroid use:

While there is no doubt that these chemicals are effective at their stated goal, albeit with significant complications, the question of how their effects manifest themselves in a baseball game has not been answered. There are no credible studies that connect drug use to improved performance, nor any that determine what cost these athletes may be paying. In 2004, Major League Baseball financed its first research grants with the pathetic sum of $100,000. The league values science about as much as one-third of the salary of the last player on the bench.

Mr. Carroll points out that Bonds’ recent production may simply be the anecdotal performance of a top baseball player:

What of this late-career surge? Certainly we can point to that with an accusing finger, sure that Bonds’s numbers in the record books have been written with some “cream” or “clear” substance. It’s much easier to point than to find facts.
According to Clay Davenport, a researcher at Baseball Prospectus, Hank Aaron’s best year for home runs – when he had the most homers per at bat – was 1973, when he was 39. His second best was in 1971, at age 37. Willie Stargell had his best seasons after age 37. Carlton Fisk put his best rate in the books when he was 40. Even Ty Cobb had his best home run rate at age 38, though the end of the dead-ball era helped that. It is not uncommon, according to Mr. Davenport, for a slugger to change his mechanics as he ages, swinging for the fences as his ability to run the bases declines.

And Mr. Carroll concludes by noting Hank Aaron‘s recent comments:

Perhaps Hank Aaron said it best: “I know that you can’t put something in your body to make you hit a fastball, changeup or curveball.”
Without more scientific studies on the effects that steroids and other drugs have on the game, we’re left with appeals to emotion, finger-pointing or worse.

Finally, in another off-season baseball post of interest, don’t miss Professor Sauer‘s fascinating post on how research is proving that the designated hitter in baseball is proving to be a moral hazard.

New Texas criminal law blog

Posted on by
Reply

South Texas of Law Professor Dru Stevenson is now blogging over at South Texas Law Professor.

Cheapening the death penalty

Posted on by
Reply

University of Iowa Law Professor Tung Yin observes persuasively that jury’s assessment of the death penalty on Scott Peterson is not in the public interest.