Levitt settled the second defamation claim by admitting in a letter to John B. McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of the "Journal of Law and Economics", that Lott had not engaged in bribery (paying for extra costs of printing and postage for a conference issue is customary), and that he knew that "scholars with varying opinions" (including Levitt himself) had been invited to participate. The "Chronicle of Higher Education" characterized Levitt's letter as offering "a doozy of a concession."