The Volokh Conspiracy

The WSJ reports today that many colleges and universities are dialing back the maximum hours that adjunct professors can teach to drop them under the 30 hours per week trigger of Obamacare, above which the employer would be required to provide health insurance or pay a penalty.

The federal health-care overhaul is prompting some colleges and universities to cut the hours of adjunct professors, renewing a debate about the pay and benefits of these freelance instructors who handle a significant share of teaching at U.S. higher-education institutions.

The Affordable Care Act requires large employers to offer a minimum level of health insurance to employees who work 30 hours a week or more starting in 2014, or face a penalty. The mandate is a particular challenge for colleges and universities, which increasingly rely on adjuncts to help keep costs down as states have scaled back funding for higher education.

A handful of schools, including Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania and Youngstown State University in Ohio, have curbed the number of classes that adjuncts can teach in the current spring semester to limit the schools’ exposure to the health-insurance requirement. Others are assessing whether to do so, or to begin offering health care to some adjuncts.

In Ohio, instructor Robert Balla faces a new cap on the number of hours he can teach at Stark State College. In a Dec. 6 letter, the North Canton school told him that “in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act…employees with part-time or adjunct status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week.”

Mr. Balla, a 41-year-old father of two, had taught seven English composition classes last semester, split between Stark State and two other area schools. This semester, his course load at Stark State is down to one instead of two as a result of the school’s new limit on hours, cutting his salary by about a total of $2,000.

Stark State’s move came as a blow to Mr. Balla, who said he earns about $40,000 a year and cannot afford health insurance.

“I think it goes against the spirit of the [health-care] law,” Mr. Balla said. “In education, we’re working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.”

The article doesn’t report for whom Professor Balla cast his vote this fall.

I have a column at the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus this morning (“A Bit of Sarbanes-Oxley for Universities, Please“) commenting on Benjamin Ginsberg’s proposal to apply Sarbanes-Oxley to universities.

Lawrence Velvel, Dean of Massachusetts School of Law, reviews Brian Tamanaha’s book on “Failing Law School” at Minding the Campus.

The American Bankruptcy Institute has assembled a commission on the reform of Chapter 11 (I’ve participated on the very far periphery on a working group on one issue).  For those who are interested, Bob Price has an overview the ABI’s process and what it seeks to accomplish here.

As one who travels a lot in competition policy circles, I’m familiar with many of the criticisms of the modern intellectual property system.  So I’ve always enjoyed and benefited from my colleague Adam Mossoff and his critiques of those criticisms.  He has a piece up at Forbes.com that is a nice summary of his approach to these questions and an overview of his responses.  As I take his point, and his extensive historical research that supports it, is essentially that although there are a lot of theoretical criticisms of the patent system, there is little actual empirical evidence to back it up.  Well worth a read.

I’ve written a longish book review of David Skeel’s new book on Dodd-Frank ,”The New Financial Deal,” for my friends at the Law and Liberty blog.

The George Mason Law and Economics Center has announced that it is adding a second section of its summer program on Economics for Law Professors.  The first section was limited to 30 participants and was oversubscribed and so a second section is being added that will run concurrently with the first.  The program will run July 7-19, 2003 at Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort in Avon, Colorado.

Information is available here.

Josh Blackman, Miriam A. Cherry and Tom W. Bell claim that it violates the First Amendment.

Another outstanding Forum on the Law and Liberty blog, this time on the Constitution and the common law.  The main essay is by Jim Stoner with comments by John McGinnis and Hadley Arkes.  Highly recommended.

Adam Pritchard and I took a crack at this issue about 15 years ago, very much in the spirit of John McGinnis’s essay here (John, in fact, published a comment on our article at that time).

Bob Price has written up excerpts from an interview with Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain commenting on various issues in the controversial GM, Delphi, and Hostess bankruptcies.  While I disagree with some of Price’s points it seems to me that he is correct in his key observation, which is that although the presence of a collective-bargaining agreement often does matter in bankruptcy, it doesn’t seem like it explains what is going on with respect to the treatment provided to the Delphi salaried employees and smaller unions in Delphi versus the treatment given to the UAW and Steelworkers.

Price has also been closely following the controversy that has been brewing with respect to the decisions in the Delphi bankruptcy case to terminate the pensions of Delphi’s salaried employees (even though they seem to have been almost fully funded) while at the same time diverting $1 billion from the GM bailout funds to top-off the pensions of the UAW (and a few other unions) in the Delphi case (which I wrote about with James Sherk).

Price also has posted an interesting interview with Congressman Bob Turner, who has been trying to get to the bottom of how the decision was made to terminate the pensions of the Delphi salaried employees and the role of the Obama Administration’s task force in making the decision (which appears to have been larger than originally thought).

The Institute for Humane Studies has just rolled out a new online program called “Learn Liberty Academy.”  It is set up to integrate IHS’s very popular “Learn Liberty” videos with webcast lectures and interactions with professors on various topics such as drug prohibition, poverty, that national debt, and other topics.

here.  A few brief excerpts:

In Why Tolerate Religion? Brian Leiter, author of theLeiter Reports blog and a law professor at the University of Chicago who has an interest in philosophy, asks why Western democracies have sought to promote and protect religion—and religious liberty—in both law and culture.

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What to make of this? Leiter’s argument suffers from a pair of damning flaws. First, he misconceives religion, the nature of religious beliefs, and the relationship between faith and reason (at least as understood by non-fideistic traditions of faith). Second, he wrongly assumes that Kantian and utilitarian arguments are our only options. These two errors are not unconnected. Had Leiter seriously explored both virtue-ethic and natural-law forms of Aristotelian-Thomistic approaches to morality and politics, he might have achieved a better understanding of what religion is and why it deserves special protection.

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Indeed, Leiter’s treatment of that history is astonishingly superficial. He spends three paragraphs, for example, dismissing Thomistic thought, betraying a stunningly shallow understanding of it and summarily concluding that there are no “lines of thought that converge on the conclusion that one should affirm a transcendent cause.” Never mind Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Newman, much less leading contemporary heirs to their project.

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So what can one say by way of conclusion? There is an interesting book to be written on the relation of conscience rights and religious liberty, but unfortunately this isn’t it. That book would need to get clear on the real nature of religion and thus the foundations of religious liberty. Academic philosophers—especially philosophers of religion—will likely ignore this book. The rest of us can safely do likewise.

I wanted to make sure to express a heartfelt and humble thank you to the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics for winning its 2012 prize for Best Article in Austrian Economics for my co-authored article (with Ed Stringham) “Hayekian Anarchism.”  And, of course, special thanks to Ed for collaborating with me on the project.  The award is administered by the Foundation for Economic Education and the announcement is here.  Congratulations go out to my friend and GMU colleague Peter Boettke who wont the award for Best Book in Austrian Economics for his book Living Economics.  Also, thanks to Ed for attending the Southern Economic Association meeting this weekend to accept the award on our behalf (so far they have not contacted me about establishing a live satellite feed so that I can appear as well).

I also wanted to take a moment to express a particular word of gratitude to my undergraduate honors thesis advisor at Dartmouth Vincent Starzinger as many of the ideas that finally saw the light of day in this article stretch all the way back to that time.  I recall his remarkable response when I asked him to be my advisor for the the thesis.  He said, “I know very little about Hayek, but this will give me a great opportunity to learn more about him.  So I’d be happy to do it.”  To this day I recall that response as the very model of what a professor should be–humble, curious, and ready to learn from his students as well as to teach them.  And, indeed, I’ve stolen that same line (and I hope the same attitude) on many occasions since then.  It is also a testament to the ways in which we are influenced by our teachers and mentors in ways that go beyond the narrow focus of the academic work we do.  The man was a true model of what a professor should be.  I know that my fondness for The ‘Zinger is not idiosyncratic, so please leave your favorite “Zinger” stories in the Comments.

I’ve posted a new article on SSRN that will be part of a symposium on “Libertarian Legal Theory” organized by the Chapman Law Review, “Libertarianism, Law and Economics, and The Common Law“:

Abstract: 
This article was prepared as a contribution to the Chapman Law Review’s symposium on “Libertarian Legal Theory.” While libertarian legal theory and law and economics share many affinities there are places in which both the method of the common law and the substantive rules of the common law differ from libertarian philosophy.

In this article I focus on some of these differences and explain why in the end I have come to side with the rules generated by the common law and explained by law and economics when those results clash with those derived by libertarian philosophy. To some extent the essay is autobiographical: I initially came to my study of the common law with strong libertarian priors but have eventually found the common law and law and economics to provide a more compelling positive and normative structure for understanding law than philosophical libertarianism.

I’m passing along for interest a call for papers for a conference next year on “equality as a social and political ideal guiding public policy”:

The George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics, and Institutions, which has its home at Ohio University, invites paper proposals for a conference and subsequent edited volume on Equality and Public Policy.

The conference will be held at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (14–16 November 2013). Gerald Gaus (Arizona) will deliver the keynote lecture, while Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan), Dierdre McCloskey (Illinois- Chicago), George Sher (Rice), Scott Winship (Brookings Institution), Steve Horowitz (St. Lawrence) and Todd Zywicki (George Mason) will deliver plenary lectures.

This conference aims to promote academic discussion and to explore new research trends on equality as a social and political ideal guiding public policy. The conference organizers welcome the work of advanced doctoral students and both young and established scholars in the fields of philosophy, economics, law, political science, history, and other fields in which equality is a topic of research.

Proposals — which should include a 500-word abstract, a brief curriculum vitae, and current contact information should be sent by 1 February 2013, to the conference organizers.

Dr. Mark LeBar (lebar [at] ohio [dot] edu)

Dr. Robert G. Ingram (washingtonforum [at] ohio [dot] edu)

Notifications will be sent in early March.

Conference flyer at http://www.gwfohio.org/news_events.