Hedonic Damages

Well I just started my blog and already I am going to be missing a day. I will be gone till late Sunday in Michigan (mabye I will make it back in time to post).

We take this trip every year and stay in some half-houses with my aunts and uncles. It should be ok, except I have the joy of writting a paper for my summer economics class while we are there. I spent about an hour today printing off all the articles on calculating the value of life in court cases and hedonic damages that I could find. The more I read, the more I hate Stan Smith, this man gives academics a bad name, he has no appreciation for the social sciences and he does not want to study or learn anything, all he wants to do is peddle his belief in court for money.

After all of this reading I have come to the conculsion that while I intended to argue nothing
more than a need for a unified set of rules and common law (instead of a state by state set of law) we need a national standard (insert the dissent of crim pro students here). It seems to me that something as valuable and inportant as "does the human life have value to the person loosing it" would be an issue that should not be as ambiguous as it currently is. Furthermore I will probebally argue that his idea of a case by case basis for selecting a discount rate is garbage. Economists are made into hypocrits by the fact that they have to please clients. This is a joke, if you have an economist that the jury likes you get 1%, if the defense has the better expert you end up with 4%, and the actual difference can end up HUGE. We need a standard like Canada has (except national, not local).

Anyways, back to my life, I am excited about the trip, I will probebally take an LSAT while we are there (I'll let you know how I do) and hopefully we will take a quick walk around U Mich while we are there.

My uncles friend from college will be stopping up and he lives in South Bend, we may go see his house. If we do I will be pulling hard for a few hours to walk around Notre Dame, hopefully that will happen, though a direct trip home with no South Bend stop wouldn't kill me either.