Law and Econ Project, Update V

Almost one month since the previous update, and less than a month to go before the due date of what I now will call the polished draft of my Law and Econ manuscript. Uh oh.

My plan from one month ago involved rewriting the Preface, and printing out and binding an entire working draft. These tasks have been completed. Note, however, that I have cannily omitted mentioning another part of the plan, which was to draft a section of conclusions -- no progress there, as you might suspect from my attempt to censor discussion.

I also planned to finish reading Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, by Nicholas Phillipson (2010) -- more failure. But I now have completed 213 of 284 pages of text, and I am keeping up with the endnotes as I go along. So I still have hopes of finishing this book, from which I am learning quite a bit. My other goal was to make some progress on reading This is Your Country on Drugs, by Ryan Grim (2010), and little has been achieved in this regard: I have read 32 of 252 pages. Hmmm. For December 11, let me toss one more book into the pile, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz (2011). (Wow, in providing the Amazon link I read a review, which indicates that the author of this recently-published book has passed away. I hadn't heard this sad news before, though now I see that one of the blurbs on the back cover refers to the author's work in the past tense. Sad news indeed.) I have assigned one chapter of the Stuntz book to my Law and Econ class, too.

So what is left, writing-wise, for December 11? A full revision of the L&E manuscript, along with the preparation of the conclusions. Earlier I thought I might print out and bind an intermediate version before December 11, but now I am not so sure. Aiming for that polished draft, though....