Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Alas, my Christmas break ends early this year (I resume my teaching duties on Monday, Jan. 6). In the meantime, here is a subset of what I have been (or will be) reading over the holiday season (in addition to … Continue reading →

In this post, I will conclude my extended review of Altwicker & Diggelmann’s helpful taxonomy of legal progress. The fourth and final method they identify is what they call “paradigm shift-talk,” which in turn is based on the influential work … Continue reading →

Let’s proceed with our extended review of Altwicker & Diggelmann’s taxonomy of legal progress–i.e. their systematic classification of the various ways in which legal scholars make up stories about legal progress, to be more precise. In addition to the use … Continue reading →

Merry Chrismukkah! As I mentioned in a previous post, Tilmann Altwicker (Basel) and Oliver Diggelmann (Zurich) have identified four ways in which the ideal of progress is “socially-constructed” in the field of international law, beginning with the crude method of … Continue reading →

It’s Sunday, so I am interrupting my series of blog posts on the “social construction of legal progress” to share this creative end-of-year “movie trailer mashup” (hat tip: Kottke). I will resume my review of progress in law on Monday … Continue reading →

In my previous post, I shared a wide variety of law review articles and scholarly papers on the theme of legal progress. The larger question I care about, however, is this: is it possible to objectively measure progress in any … Continue reading →

One of the puzzles that has long captivated me is this: how should we measure “progress” in such normative or value-laden fields as law, art, and ethics? Aren’t such first-order values as justice, beauty, and right vs. wrong supposed to … Continue reading →

According to Coasian economic theory, “transaction costs” are supposed to determine whether people will work as individuals or collectively as firms. But does this insight apply to science research? Via Nature: “Between 2009 and 2013, 573 manuscripts listing 1,000 co-authors or … Continue reading →

Check out this thoughtful essay/blog post by Jason Crawford, which is provocatively titled “Progress studies [is] a moral imperative.” Although I am generally skeptical of “moral imperatives” (after all, moral claims are hard, if not impossible, to test or falsify, … Continue reading →