More Guns, Less Scholarship?

A month ago, Instapundit and the Volokh Conspiracy were musing on the topic of "whether there could be a Bellesiles in the legal-scholarship world." Reynolds -- who answered the question "yes and no" -- described a "good academic fraud" as one which "is meticulous on methodology, but then makes up the data to achieve the desired result."

Reynolds and Volokh may soon find an answer to their question. James Lindgren, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law has questioned the authenticity of an alleged study by Yale Law School senior research scholar John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime. In that book, Lott reported that national surveys found "98% of defensive gun uses involved brandishing with no shots being fired." A rough summary of the controversy, according to Lindgren, is as follows:

Lott says that over the course of three months in 1997, he conducted a survey with over 2,400 respondents, which resulted in the 98 percent figure. His computer crashed in June 1997, causing him to lose all computer records of the survey. Lott has no paper record of having conducted the survey, for various reasons. He had his students do the calling for the survey, but can't remember who they are, even though he paid them out of his own pocket. Although he had no backup data, Lott nevertheless cited the results in More Guns, Less Crime, which was first published in May 1998. (It was apparently a stroke of good fortune he didn't keep his book draft on the computer which crashed.) However, Lott didn't identify his own survey as the source of the statistic in the first edition of the book. Between the first and second editions of the book, the text was changed from "If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time...." to "If a national survey that I conducted is correct, 98 percent of the time...." (At least he's humble enough to treat the accuracy of his own survey with skepticism.)

Of course, More Guns, Less Crime isn't really legal scholarship in the traditional law review article sense. But it will be interesting to see how there two law school professors react to suspected misdeeds by one of their own. And, of course, it will be interesting to see how Mr. Lott responds.

(Via CalPundit, Extra Ordinary Ideas and Atrios. Oh, and Instapundit too. I realize this repeats a lot of what has already been said, but it's an interesting story which deserves the coverage.)