Another Posner-Garner Fact Check

Continuing my quest to discover the truth in even the most trivial of matters....

Garner defends the accuracy of his case explanations by describing the cite-checking process they used:

Justice Scalia and I wrote the first drafts of the case explanations ourselves, and we tried to be unimpeachably accurate in them. Beginning more than a year before publication, I had four lawyer‑colleagues at LawProse—with 55 years of professional experience among them—verify the accuracy of every statement made about every case in the book.

Posner responds with disbelief:

I have trouble believing Garner when he says that four lawyers at his company verified the accuracy of every statement made about every case in the book. The book’s Acknowledgements page thanks 96 (!) persons for helping with the book, and there is no reference to four lawyer-colleagues who slaved to make sure that every statement was accurate. 

Since I have the book now, I decided to turn to the acknowledgements page. It includes this:

At Law Prose, Inc. in Dallas, we had the benefit not only of a fine law library but also of several accomplished legal researchers: Tiger Jackson, Jeff Newman, Becky R. McDaniel, Heather C. Haines, Timothy D. Martin, and Eliot Turner.

This group presumably includes Garner's cite-checking lawyer-colleagues. Very odd.

Incidentally, I count 101 "persons" (including one corporate person, William S. Hein & Co.) thanked on the acknowledgments page—not 96, as Posner states. Is it just a coincidence that 101 minus 96 is five, and that Posner seems to have missed the five legal researchers at Law Prose? (*See update for my mistaken lawyer math.) Or is Posner actually looking at a different version of the Acknowledgements that left them out? That is the only scenario in which Posner's accusation that Garner is lying is defensible. But that scenario seems very unlikely, particularly since the paragraph thanking the Law Prose researchers goes on to thank several other Law Prose "staffers."

UPDATE: An astute reader informed me that I left out Timothy D. Martin from the list of Law Prose legal researchers, so there are actually six of them, not five. As a result, the "multiple Acknowledgments" theory doesn't hold water.

Facts, R.I.P.?

The Chicago Tribune has published an obituary of Facts:

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.

The Gillette-Torvik Blog has done its part covering this story in its Poolitzer-Prize-winning series entitled, "The Nature of Reality."

The New York Times editorial board spreads lies about Wisconsin and equal pay

Here. I'm not going to spend any more time debunking this stuff, but this is why I try never to read newspaper editorials.

UPDATE 4/24/2012:

The Times doubles down, with another editorial today in which it falsely states that Scott Walker "this month signed a law repealing a 2009 state wage discrimination law." The Equal Pay Enforcement Act was not a wage discrimination law. More proof that Facts are dead.