Lessig + Posner

Posner and Lessig are two of my favorite law profs. How wonderful that Posner is writing on Lessig's blog. The topic: intellectual property, something that I had discussed with both individuals.

One of the nice things about Posner is that he's been at this game for a long time, both on the academic side but also on the practical side (on the 7th Circuit). He is fully aware of the folly inherent in laws, lawyers, legal academics, courts, and judges. How else do you characterize someone who creates an entire field of law ("Law and Economics") but now sums up the idea judicial posture as "be reasonable"? One of the reasons copyright has been revealed as so out of control is because the costs of the bad laws only rose recently, with the Internet, and the incentives on legislation, persecution, and interpretation have been made unbalanced because of the low coordination cost between publishers vs the high coordination costs between consumers.

I also look forward to Posner's upcoming book on risk. Risk is something that humans are pretty awful at thinking about, but which impacts large amounts of our legislative impulses. His thoughts on the 9/11 report (which I thought was a pretty amateur effort) are interesting, and I look forward to more.