Osler's Razor

Comments from "Joe" to the previous footnote post reminded me of my own meandering use of footnotes. Below is fn 197 from my 2003 article in the South Carolina Law Review, "Must Have Got Lost: Traditional Sentencing Goals, The False Trail of Uniformity and Process, and the Way Back Home." I think more people understood the gist of this footnote than caught the J. Geils Band reference in the title:

"The crack trade is a business. Within that business, powder cocaine is usually converted to crack on stoves by people at the bottom rungs of the organization. A fair analogy is to a neighborhood bagel store which is part of a national chain. Walk into that shop and you will see relatively low-paid employees making and selling the bagels. That is, they convert the dough shipped to the store in bulk into the end product, bagels. Look closely and you will see that the business is structured such that these low-paid workers can be easily replaced in the inevitable event the store suffers high turnover. The instructions to make the bagels are posted on the wall, the process is kept simple, and jobs are specialized to limit the amount of skill needed. If you wanted to close down that bagel shop, it would be futile to address the problem by arresting the counter help and bagel makers because the shop is structured for them to be easily replaced. Rather, one would have to incapacitate the key men and women in the chain--those who controlled logistics, financing, or management through specialized skills not so easily replaced."