Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
AI meets Rorschach inkblots
In case you’ve ever wondered what would happen if artificial intelligence were trained to perform image captions of Rorschach inkblots, this crazy website created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab is for you. Here are some sample Rorschach inkblots … Continue reading
#DueProcess #PassiveVirtues
SCOTUS announced its decision in the Colorado gay wedding cake case yesterday (4 June). In brief, the Court side-stepped the main substantive issue (is baking a wedding cake a form of expression under the First Amendment?) and decided the case … Continue reading
Probability in plain words (review of Allen and Pardo, part 5)
As we mentioned in a previous post (part 4 of our review of Allen and Pardo’s relative plausibility paper), “plausibility”, however defined, is just another word for “probability.” Yet, this notion of plausibility, though simple and intuitive, is a crude … Continue reading
Against relative plausibility (review of Allen and Pardo, part 4)
We have been reviewing Ron Allen and Mike Pardo’s excellent paper on “relative plausibility,” and as we mentioned in our previous post, we commend their relative plausibility theory of juridical proof for its simplicity. In brief, their theory is that … Continue reading
In defense of relative plausibility (review of Allen and Pardo, part 3)
In our previous post, we restated Ron Allen and Mike Pardo’s “relative plausibility” theory of legal proof (or what Allen and Pardo also call the “explanatory account” of evidence), an approach meant to displace probabilistic or mathematical theories of legal … Continue reading
Relative plausibility redux (review of Allen and Pardo, part 2)
As we mentioned in a previous post, law professors Ron Allen and Mike Pardo summarize and critique probabilistic theories of evidence on pp. 7-12 of their most recent paper “Relative plausibility and its critics.” (Hold on: “critique” is too polite. … Continue reading
Happy Birthday, CNN
CNN, the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage, went on the air on this day in 1980. At the time, CNN’s format was a radical innovation. Today, with the rise of the Internet, CNN–and cable TV generally–seem so antiquated …
Relative plausibility (review of Allen and Pardo, part 1)
We recently discovered Ron Allen and Mike Pardo’s new paper on “Relative plausibility and its critics” via Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog. Because of our fascination with all things Bayesian and with the role of probability theory in legal trials, … Continue reading

