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Category Archives: History
May reading list
Does reading make you a better person. Probably not! But reading is a great way to expand your horizons. So, now that the spring semester is almost over, this is what we will be reading during the month of May: … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Culture, History, Law
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The Empirical Economics Debate
In the 1930s and 1940s, academic economists were engaged in the so-called “socialist calculation debate,” a theoretical quarrel that was not fully resolved until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. (Until then, some economists seriously believed that a … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Economics, History, Questions Rarely Asked
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Starve the beast: let’s just repeal the 16th Amendment
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Law
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Justice Scalia’s Living Constitution
From Judge Posner’s forthright concurring opinion in the recent case of Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, decided en banc by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit: “A diehard ‘originalist’ would argue that what was believed in 1964 defines the … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Law
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Do we really need a supreme court? (In praise of judicial federalism: our final reply to Solum, for now.)
We will conclude our critique of public meaning originalism by posing the following judicial thought-experiment: What if we were to let the Supreme Court whither away? That is, what if the Senate simply stopped confirming any more new nominees to … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Law, Questions Rarely Asked
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The originalist problem with Brown v. Board (reply to Solum, part 4)
Note: this is the fourth in a series of five blog posts responding to Larry Solum’s defense of public meaning originalism. At some point, defenders of orginalism (like our friend and colleague Larry Solum) must contend with or explain away Brown v. … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Law
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Originalism as intellectual dishonesty? (reply to Solum, part 3)
Note: this is the third in a series of blog posts responding to Larry Solum’s defense of public meaning originalism. As we mentioned in our previous posts, Professor Larry Solum recently wrote up this statement in support of “public meaning … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Law
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Whose meaning? (reply to Solum, part 2)
Note: this is the second in a series of blog posts responding to Larry Solum’s defense of public meaning originalism. In his statement in support of Judge Gorsuch, our friend and colleague Larry Solum identifies four myths or misconceptions about … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Law, Philosophy, Uncategorized
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Larry’s fallacy
Note: this is the first in a series of five blog posts responding to Larry Solum’s defense of public meaning originalism. Our friend and colleague Larry Solum, a law professor at Georgetown, recently wrote this statement on behalf of Neil … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, History, Law, Logical Fallacies, Politics
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The problem with so-called public meaning originalism
President Trump’s nomination of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court has reignited the longstanding constitutional battle between defenders of the Living Constitution and backers of Originalism. (If this never-ending normative debate were a baseball game, it would be in the 57th … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Bayesian Reasoning, Current Affairs, History, Law, Philosophy, Politics
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prior probability 