It’s that time of year again … In addition to my regular teaching duties, here is what we were working on (outside the classroom) during the previous year (2015):

(a) Research fraud as tort, Science, Vol. 349, No. 6255 (25 Sep 2015), pp. 1459-1460.

(b) Why don’t juries try range voting?, Criminal Law Bulletin, Vol. 51, No. 3 (2015), pp. 680-692.

(c) Reply to Orin Kerr, SSRN working paper (20 June 2015).

(d) Misappropriation and The Old Man and the Sea, SSRN working paper (25 Feb 2015).

Read in isolation, these papers appear to have very little in common, but in fact, they are part of larger projects we have been working on since our early days at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Our revisionist reading of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, for example, is part of a larger project in which we explore hidden intersections between law and popular culture, while our “Reply to Orin Kerr” presents a  thought experiment, a method of analysis we have used many times before. (It’s a ridiculous thought experiment, to be sure, but our larger purpose is to demonstrate the utility of thought experiments in law, even crazy ones.) Likewise, our 2015 “range voting” paper, which proposes a novel solution to hung juries, is a sequel to our 2012 “Turing Test” paper. Lastly, our recent letter to Science on the legal implications of research fraud is not our last word on this subject, as we continue to research and write on the possibility of civil liability for research misconduct in the social sciences.