Anthony Gamboa’s Criticism of Thomas R. Ireland’s Criticism of the Lack of Merit of Gamboa-Gibson Disability Worklife Expectancy Tables Draft date: 10/27/09

Anthony M. Gamboa submitted his critique of my paper on “Why the Gamboa-Gibson Disability Work-Life Expectancy Tables Are Without Merit” to The Rehabilitation Professional, not the Journal of Legal Economics (JLE), where my paper was published in the May 2009 issue (Ireland 2009b). I assume that Gamboa submitted his paper to The Rehabilitation Professional because he did not think there was a significant chance that his paper would have been accepted by the Journal of Legal Economics. However, I also assume that his intent was to make it appear that there is an intellectual debate about the underlying issues and wanted to have a publication he could point to that could be used to reduce the impact of my earlier paper in cases where my earlier paper is introduced into litigation. His two primary criticisms, as stated in the first paragraph of his paper (p. 127) are that my opinion: mistates the significance of reduced employment levels for persons with a disability and ignores the numerous court decisions upholding the use of the use of the Gamboa-Gibson tables (The Tables), the government data, and the methodology employed in assessing earning capacity loss for persons with a disability. In this note, I address problems with those criticisms and other statements made in his paper.