This My Playground...

A couple years ago the authors of one of my favorite books, Freakanomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner were sued by John Lott. Lott is a research scientist at the University of Maryland and is well known conservative gun rights advocate. Lott claimed that in their book Levitt and Dubner had dismissed a study that Lott had performed that went to show that carrying concealed weapons lowers crime rates. Levitt and Dubner were sued because Lott said they had defamed him and his research because as Levitt and Dubner had correctly pointed out that other researchers had not been able to replicate Lott's findings.

Lott said in the lawsuit that the claims of the authors "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."

He lost, he appealed and now the appeals court has turned down that appeal stating "To the extent that Lott is complaining about an attack on his ideas, and not his character, he is barking up the wrong tree. The remedy for this kind of academic dispute is the publication of a rebuttal, not an award of damages."

I wonder where Lott stands on the traditional conservative idea of a frivolous lawsuit.