In addition to my regular teaching duties, this past year I worked on several different projects and attended a number of conferences. Here, I will review my scholarly activities during the first half of 2023:

1. TRUTH MARKETS PAPER: In January of 2023, I submitted my paper on “Truth Markets” to The Journal of Free Speech Law. Outcome: rejection due to two negative (for the most part) but extremely useful referee reports. (I would later re-write and improve the paper during the second half of 2023.)
2. ADVENTURES IN A.I.: Also in January, I finally began playing around with ChatGPT; among other things, I fed some of the research questions that I had worked on in past papers into the chatbot and then shared the results of my AI adventures on this blog. (See here, for example.)
3. REVIEW OF RULE OF LAW: I began writing up an in-depth, chapter-by-chapter review of the book Rule of Law by Tom Bingham, and I posted each installment of my multi-part review to this blog. (Here, by way of example, is my review of Chapter 3.)
4. RICHARD POSNER’S LEGACY: I also began writing up a series of blog posts in honor of my intellectual mentor and hero Richard Posner, starting with this one.
5. CONFERENCES: Next, I attended two cool conferences during the month of March: one on March 10, 2023 on the topic of “Advanced Air Mobility” at my home institution, the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, where I discussed the pros and cons of regulating the new “flying car” industry; the other on March 17-18, 2023 on new developments in the law of contracts (the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Contracts or KCON XVI) at Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas, where I presented my work-in-progress on “belief contracts”. (Here is a selfie I took of my panel at KCON.)
6. ADAM SMITH REVIEW. In April my review of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life by Ryan Patrick Hanley was published in Volume 13 of The Adam Smith Review. (See here.)
7. ALMA MATER: Also in April, my wife and I visited my college alma mater, the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I conducted research on one aspect of Adam Smith’s life — his studies at Oxford in the 1740s — and wrote up the first draft of my paper “Adam Smith, David Hume, and the Balliol College Conspiracy“, which is now under review at the Journal of the History of Economic Ideas.
8. FIRST DRAFT OF OUTER SPACE AUCTIONS: In May of 2023, I finally got around to writing my “shitty first draft” of a formal paper I had been actively researching since December of 2021. (In fact, I had already done so much research on this particular topic that the paper practically wrote itself!)
9. COASE’S PARABLE: Also in May (25 May, to be precise), my law review article “Coase’s Parable” was published in the Mercer Law Review. (This is another paper that practically wrote itself back in the summer of 2022, for I have been fascinated with the Coase Theorem since my first year of law school, when my torts professor Guido Calabresi introduced me to Ronald Coase’s classic paper “The Problem of Social Cost” in the fall of 1990.)
10. ADAM SMITH 300: In June of 2023, my family and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean to celebrate the tercentenary of Adam Smith’s birth in Scotland. In addition to attending a series of public lectures at the University of Glasgow and presenting my work on Adam Smith’s friendship with Horace Walpole, I also got to meet such luminaries as Sir Angus Deaton, Ryan Patrick Hanley, Dierdre McCloskey, and Craig Smith (no relation); visited David Hume and Adam Smith’s graves in Edinburgh; and got to take a private tour of Panmure House, where Adam Smith lived during the last 12 years of his life — highlights that I shall never forget!

Note: I will write up the second half of my year in review in the next day or two.