Freakonomics Author Levitt Sued For Defamation

Posted on April 13, 2006

Now that the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code trial is over, we were feeling a bit bereft. No more authors on the stand making mincemeat of a bullying opposing counsel. No more arcane copyright discussions. But wait, there's hope. A former Yale Law School researcher has filed suit against HarperCollins and Steven D. Levitt for defamation. Levitt is the co-author of Freakonomics. The Book Standard reports:

The suit, filed in Chicago on Monday, alleges that Levitt defamed researcher John Lott with comments about his research on gun control. Levitt writes in Freakonomics that no one has been able to replicate Lott�s research, which claims to have found that the right to carry guns leads to lower crime rates. The assertion that those findings have not been backed up with outside research, the lawsuit charges, implies that Lott falsified his results.
Freakonomics, which was published last May by Harper imprint Morrow, "damages Lott�s reputation in the eyes of the academic community in which he works, and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of academics, college students, graduate students and members of the general public who read Freakonomics," the suit contends. As tracked by Nielsen BookScan, Freakonomics has sold more than 909,000 units since its release.
Lott, recently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is seeking unspecified damages, a stop in sales of Freakonomics and a retraction printed in future editions of the book. Levitt�s co-author, Stephen J. Dubner, was not named in the suit.

The researcher is not a public figure, so the defamation allegation will be somewhat easier to prove. But it seems a bit murky. If it is a true fact that the researcher's results have not been replicated by any one else, Levitt was certainly entitled to say so. It's interesting that only one of the authors was sued, which makes us wonder if something else isn't going on here -- something personal.