It’s not being a spy and it’s not being a surfer – in fact the most dangerous jobs in America probably aren’t any of the occupations that you might guess. Here are the top five:

1. Job: Fishing

Risk factors: The producers of “Deadliest Catch” don’t need to create much artificial drama, as fishers and fishing workers have — on average — the most dangerous jobs in the country. Malfunctioning gear, inclement weather and transportation incidents all factor into the highest fatality rate, a distinction it has held since 1992.

Fatality rate: 127.3 per 100,000 workers, 42 total

Median annual salary: $25,590

2. Job: Logging workers

Risk factors: Total logging fatalities in the U.S. increased from 59 to 65 from 2010 to 2011. Dangers are apparent when spending most of your days outside with heavy machinery, frequently bad weather and occasional high altitudes.

Fatality rate: 104 per 100,000 workers, 65 total

Median annual salary: $32,870

3. Job: Aircraft pilots and flight engineers

Risk factors: Though pilots are often financially compensated for the inherent dangers and responsibilities of their jobs, no amount of money can change the fact that it’s a long way down.

Fatality rate: 56.1 per 100,000 workers, 71 total

Median annual salary: $118,070 airline, $92,060 commercial

4. Job: Refuse and recyclable material collectors

Risk factors: Trash and recyclable collectors don’t get enough credit for maintaining order in society. Trash collector strikes are never a pretty thing and neither is the high fatality rate.

Fatality rate: 36.4 per 100,000 workers, 30 total

Median annual salary: $35,230

5. Job: Roofers

Risk factors: It doesn’t take a history in roofing to know that the biggest danger is not sunburns or hammered fingers. Falls are the leading culprit in fatal injuries, while other nonfatal injuries like fractures make general construction work among the most injury-prone jobs.

Fatality rate: 34.1 per 100,000 workers, 60 total

Median annual salary: $34,220

Check out the rest of the top 10 here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on university presidents who have passed the million dollar mark in compensation. But wait, there’s more:

Many presidents have a substantial portion of their overall pay tied up in deferred compensation, which they receive only if they stay on the job for a specified number of years. Trustees say they prefer such arrangements because deferred-compensation plans help retain presidents. But the prevalence of such benefits also means that the public can learn relatively little about those presidents’ overall earnings by looking at base salary alone.

Ben Depoorter (UC Hastings Law) has recently posted “The Upside of Losing” on SSRN (forthcoming in Columbia Law Review) — arguing that not all losses in court are necessarily a loss, politically. Here’s the abstract:

Conventional understanding in legal reform communities is that time and resources are best directed toward legal disputes that have the highest chance of success and that litigation is to be avoided if it is likely to establish or strengthen unfavorable precedent. Contrary to this accepted wisdom, this Essay analyzes the strategic decisions of litigation entrepreneurs who pursue litigation with the awareness that losing the case can provide substantial benefits. Unfavorable litigation outcomes can be uniquely salient and powerful in highlighting the misfortunes of individuals under prevailing law, while presenting a broader narrative about the current failure of the legal status quo. The resulting public backlash may slow down legislative trends and can even prompt legislative initiatives that reverse the unfavorable judicial decisions or induce broader reform.

This analysis revises some conventional wisdom about litigation. First, while it is traditionally understood that legal reform activists must persuade courts to recognize unattended rights or to confirm new rights and activist positions, the analysis here suggests that social changes can be obtained in litigation without requiring the involvement of courts as policymakers. Moreover, passive courts and judicial deference in fact strengthen the mobilizing effect of litigation by clearly shifting the burden to legislators and their constituents. Second, the dynamics of successful defeat in litigation shed new light on the costs and benefits involved with litigation. In the proposed framework, a plaintiff’s decision to litigate rests not simply on the probability of success but also on a tradeoff between the potential costs of a negative precedent and the political benefits obtained in defeat. Third, the mobilizing potential of adverse court decisions presents a fascinating conflict between the immediate interests of the actual plaintiff and of the litigation entrepreneur or intermediary that supports the litigation with an eye on the underlying long-term goals of a social cause. Finally, the potential benefits of adverse outcomes refute some of the criticisms about the limitations and downsides of pursuing social change through courts.

You can download the paper here.

With academics increasingly coming under pressure to demonstrate that scholarship has real world impact, citation to government decisions seems informative. I took a few minutes to assemble some statistics on court citation to various journals. If you are not familiar with this resource, Washington & Lee Law Library offers an online tool to assess journals’ impact – both in academic writing and in court citation (i.e. how often has a journal’s articles been cited by a state or federal court). The tool provides information on a wide variety of legal journals and some from other disciplines. I’ve assembled below cumulative number of times various journals that might be familiar to political scientists are cited by state and federal courts from 2003-20011. As might be expected, most of the journals are law oriented. If you’re interested in this sort of information, then you can conduct your own analysis on their website. It even allows you to download your findings into an excel spreadsheet. I do not portray this analysis as being perfect- just my quick take. So, as the picture above suggests – take it all with a grain of salt. For comparison, Harvard Law Review has 2500+ for the time period.

• American Political Science Review – 5 citations, available 2007-11
• Judicature – 179 citations
• Journal of Legal Studies – 103 citations
• Law & Society Review – 64 citations
• Law & Social Inquiry – 26 citations
• Journal of Empirical Legal Studies – 129 citations
• Journal of Law, Economics and Organization – 19 citations

Being a member of congress can be pretty cool for a number of reasons. One reason is the air travel advantages they receive – like preferred parking and a free ‘shotgun’ approach to scheduling flights. Joshua Green of Bloomberg Business Week outlines these perks in “The Pampered World of Congressional Air Travel.”

The group that Congress is helping the most by lifting the FAA sequester isn’t business flyers. No, lawmakers are helping themselves. There is no more pampered class of air traveler than members of Congress.At Washington’s Reagan National Airport, they have their own special parking spaces—right up close to the terminal—that they don’t even have to pay for. As Bloomberg Television’s Hans Nichols reports, this perk costs the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority $738,760 in foregone revenue. ….

Being a member of Congress also means never having to rush to catch a flight. The airlines allow lawmakers the special privilege of simultaneously booking themselves on multiple flights, so that if they are late or their flight is canceled, they’re guaranteed a spot on the next one. A few years ago, a prominent senator paused in the middle of a conversation with me to bark at an aide, “Book me on the 6, 7, and 8 p.m. shuttles!”

Check out the rest here. H/T Boing Boing

If you haven’t checked out Jerry Seinfeld’s new web show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee then you should – it’s a lot of fun. But a recent article in Grub Street NY (NY Mag) reveals that he’s only a recent convert to the joys of coffee. Here are three revealing insights he provides on his new found liquid friend:

• “When you go into 3 Guys Coffeeshop on Columbus, don’t complain that it’s not as good as Gimme! Coffee or Mudd or one of these places. Appreciate that for what that is. Know the difference, but don’t be a pain in the ass about it.”
• “We want to do a lot of stuff. We’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.”
• “Eating is annoying and difficult to arrange … meeting someone for coffee suddenly seemed like a wonderful, compact, accessible, and portable social interaction.”

Check out the rest here.

You can check out “Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk” by Dan Kahan (Yale law school) on SSRN. The abstract is available below the fold.

Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to form beliefs about societal dangers that reflect and reinforce their commitments to particular visions of the ideal society. Cultural cognition is one of a variety of approaches designed to empirically test the cultural theory of risk associated with Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky. This commentary discusses the distinctive features of cultural cognition as a conception of cultural theory, including its cultural worldview measures; its emphasis on social psychological mechanisms that connect individuals’ risk perceptions to their cultural outlooks; and its practical goal of enabling self-conscious management of popular risk perceptions in the interest of promoting scientifically sound public policies that are congenial to persons of diverse outlooks.

More information on the Yale cultural cognition project is available here.

Is told on Buzzfeed with a series of related photos. (Hint: there is a  War on Drugs theme). As  a side note, the photo above must be one of the most bizarre celebrity couple pictures I’ve ever seen.

Behold presidents with hats

And a cool video on presidents and hats after the jump!

Neil Richards (Washington University Law) has posted “The Dangers of Surveillance” on SSRN. It discusses some concrete, but perhaps overlooked, harms posed by excessive surveillance – both government and private. It also offers a number of guiding principles for assessing surveillance law. The abstract is available below the fold.

From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, our culture is full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad, and why we should be wary of it. To the extent the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context, and why it matters. Developments in government and corporate practices have made this problem more urgent. Although we have laws that protect us against government surveillance, secret government programs cannot be challenged until they are discovered. And even when they are, courts frequently dismiss challenges to such programs for lack of standing, under the theory that mere surveillance creates no tangible harms, as the Supreme Court did recently in the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International. We need a better account of the dangers of surveillance.

This article offers such an account. Drawing on law, history, literature, and the work of scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of “surveillance studies,” I explain what those harms are and why they matter. At the level of theory, I explain when surveillance is particularly dangerous, and when it is not. Surveillance is harmful because it can chill the exercise of our civil liberties, especially our intellectual privacy. It ialso gives the watcher power over the watched, creating the the risk of a variety of other harms, such as discrimination, coercion, and the threat of selective enforcement, where critics of the government can be prosecuted or blackmailed for wrongdoing unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance.

At a practical level, I propose a set of four principles that should guide the future development of surveillance law, allowing for a more appropriate balance between the costs and benefits of government surveillance. First, we must recognize that surveillance transcends the public-private divide. Even if we are ultimately more concerned with government surveillance, any solution must grapple with the complex relationships between government and corporate watchers. Second, we must recognize that secret surveillance is illegitimate, and prohibit the creation of any domestic surveillance programs whose existence is secret. Third, we should recognize that total surveillance is illegitimate and reject the idea that it is acceptable for the government to record all Internet activity without authorization. Fourth, we must recognize that surveillance is harmful. Surveillance menaces intellectual privacy and increases the risk of blackmail, coercion, and discrimination; accordingly, we must recognize surveillance as a harm in constitutional standing doctrine.

Lee Epstein (University of Southern California) was recently awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. You can read more about it here.

Andrew Martin (Washington University) was recently named the Charles Nagel Chair of Constitutional Law and Political Science. Read more about it here.

M. Ryan Calo has posted “Code, Nudge, or Notice?” on SSRN. It provides a review of three popular notions regarding regulating human behavior. Here is the abstract:Laws can be hard to pass and easy to ignore. Regulators are increasingly turning to alternatives to law to influence citizen behavior. This Essay compares three methods that have particularly captured the imagination of scholars and officials in recent years. Much has been written about each method in isolation. This Essay considers them together in order to generate a novel normative insight about the nature of regulatory choice.

The first alternative method, known colloquially as architecture or “code,” occurs where regulators change a physical or digital environment to make undesirable conduct difficult. Speed bumps provide a classic example. The second method, libertarian paternalism or “nudging,” refers to leveraging human bias to guide us toward better policy outcomes. For instance, the state might attempt to increase organ donation by moving to an opt-out system because people disproportionally favor the status quo. Finally, mandatory disclosure or “notice” works by requiring organizations to provide individuals with information about their practices or products. Examples include everything from product warnings to privacy policies.

These methods feel more distinct than they actually are. The timely example of graphic warnings on cigarettes illustrates how hard it can be to characterize a given intervention, and why categories matter. The issue — which the Supreme Court seems likely to hear — turns on whether the Food and Drug Administration intended for the warnings to change smoker behavior, or merely to provide information. Indeed, whether regulators employ code, nudge, or notice, there is almost always the deeper choice between helping citizens and hindering them. This Essay argues that regulators should choose “facilitation” over “friction” where possible, especially in the absence of the usual safeguards that accompany law.