That is the title of my latest paper, which was published in Volume 9 of the Journal of Law, available here (via the Journal of Legal Metrics) or here (via SSRN). In summary, my paper contributes to the literature on adjudication by proposing a simple method for operationalizing Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s valuable insights about the Bayesian nature of the judicial process. (See Posner & Vermeule (2016), “The votes of other judges.”) Also, although the Journal of Law may look and sound like a conventional law review, it is really a bundle of smaller-scale esoteric journals–including the Journal of Legal Metrics, the Journal of Attenuated Subtleties, and quite a few others–all published in a single volume. According its official website, the Journal of Law “is an incubator of a sort, providing legal intellectuals with something akin to what business schools’ incubators offer entrepreneurs: friendly, small-scale, in-kind support for ideas for which (a) there might be a market, but (b) there is not yet backing among established, deep-pocketed powers-that-be.” As such, I am especially humbled and honored to have published my latest Bayesian paper in the Journal of Law. (Fun fact: According to WordPress, this is my 2501st all-time blog post since I began blogging in July of 2013!)
Degrees of judicial belief …
