Virginia Tech

I have refrained from visiting the painful topic of the VT killings because they're basically off-topic and well covered elsewhere. Moreover, I generally resist the urge to try to draw public policy "lessons" from incomprehensible horror. I particularly don't like the tendency to trivialize an event like this by borrowing its weight for our particular issue.

So I resisted the urge when I first heard the stories about how the school evidently felt legally blocked from responding to knowledge of Cho's disturbing behavior. But as we learn more about how much was known about the killer and the legal bind the school faced in doing anything about it, this story becomes more difficult to ignore. Indeed, I suspect it will emerge as a lead issue. Here's a roundup of stories by Walter Olson, with particular reference to a story in today's NYT.

And it's not off-topic. The privacy-related laws and court decisions were the result of a failure to think through the institutional implications of regulation. In particular, politicians and regulators often don't recognize that those who are subject to the law face immediate sanctions for non-compliance, while not internalizing the social gains of more reasonable and flexible interpretations of the rules they deal with. The problem, of course, isn't the rules themselves, it's the litigation. It's not surprising, therefore, that the people on the ground often err on the side of compliance.

This is precisely the situation that corporate actors face when confronted by laws like SOX. Thankfully SOX will (probably) not have the dreadful consequences we witnessed at Virginia Tech. But the two situations are at least structurally related. We often hear that the problem with SOX isn't the rules themselves, but the over-compliance by auditors and executives. But the compliance is a reasonable reaction given an incentive structure of high risk, low reward.

There will of course be the usual urge to blame the VT officials, and probably the usual litigation. But I really hope that this urge is diverted in the appropriate direction of understanding why the folks at VT acted or failed to act as they did, and adjusting the regulatory and litigation response accordingly.