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What you say? How can those two possible be similar? Well, more similar than you think, at least as far as the intents of the legislatures go.

As Ilya Somin notes at this Room for Debate post, this ban will likely have no effect on stopping th,e killing of animals to make fur. Anyone can go outside of town (East Hollywood, if it exists) to buy a fur. Yet the law still has a rational basis.

Now how does this relate to guns? When the DC City Council passed their draconian handgun ban in the 1970s, members quite publicly stated that they knew it would have absolutely no impact on gun safety. They knew anyone could buy a gun from Maryland or Virginia and smuggle it in. Their predictions were quite right. The murder rate in DC steadily increased even after the ban. But their purpose was to stigmatize guns. They wanted to start a social movement that would lead to banning guns throughout the entire United States.

I think the fur ban is similar. These Hollywood elites are (likely) under no pretenses that this ban would make any difference. Rather, they wish to stigmatize the owning of fur, and perhaps hope these laws will catch on elsewhere.

stigmatize

This post was based on some reading I did in Adam Winkler’s interesting book GunFight, which I am reviewing for the Texas Law Review. Stay tuned though, I have some substantive critiques of the book.

I just ordered a copy of Moneyball. It seems there are a lot of applications of these principles to legal education. Why not the legal profession?

Can we apply Moneyball-style analysis to law? The answer is a qualified “yes,” informed by three considerations:

First, value of services is inherently more nuanced than value in goods, and law is toward the more nuanced end of the spectrum of services (say more nuanced than a baseball player, a real estate agent or a travel agent, but probably less than a psychotherapist).

Second, value discussions have to be specific—value in sell-side mergers and acquisitions is different from buy-side, and altogether different from counseling to avoid employment discrimination claims.

Third, discussing value is always going to be useful, even though it doesn’t lead to one absolute standard.

This conference looks quite interesting:

A group of us are getting together in Chicago on Oct. 29 at the College of Law Practice Management to pursue this topic, and I hope you can join us at the Futures Conference(PDF) or participate online in a continuing discussion.