Creative Commons
Blogs I Follow
Category Archives: Law
Bud Light for President?
Cheers! This lighthearted beer ad actually teaches an important lesson regarding statutory and constitutional interpretation–a fundamental lesson often lost on naive “originalists” or textualist legal scholars: a word or term of art like “party” (or “speech,” “arms,” “natural born,” etc.) … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Current Affairs, Language, Law
Leave a comment
Is Judge Judy a fraud?
She is the highest paid “judge” in the world. In reality, she’s a private arbitrator who pretends to be a real judge on her famous court TV show, but that is not why she might be a fraud, at least … Continue reading
Posted in Deception, Ethics, Law
5 Comments
Is Senator Cruz a “natural born citizen”?
(P1) Major premise: Article II of the U.S. Constitution categorically states: “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President” (emphasis added). This proposition is thus our “major premise” or general principle of … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Language, Law
1 Comment
Review of Trivers (2016)
We’ve just finished reading Robert Trivers’s strange memoir “Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist.” But before proceeding with our short review, we must disclose up front that Dr Trivers is one of our intellectual heroes–along with Thomas Schelling, Gordon … Continue reading
Posted in Law, Science
2 Comments
Lesson 0 (law & ethics)
This semester, we are teaching a large undergraduate course (as well as an honors section) on “the legal and ethical environment of business.” Specifically, we are using the founding of Facebook–as depicted in the book “The Accidental Billionaires” and in … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Law
5 Comments
The evolution of public law (cannabis edition)
Critical thinking question: Are the drug-policy preferences of the “median voter” in Texas different from those of the median voter in Colorado, or are these legal/policy differences the result of some failure of the political process in those States … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Law
Leave a comment
Good vs Evil (legal citation edition)
https://twitter.com/DrRimmer/status/681988034603036672 Hey there … We just found out–via James Creedon and Matthew Rimmer (above)–that two of our colleagues (professors C.J. Sprigman and Carl Malamud, to be more exact) are working on an open source (i.e. free) version of legal citation … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Law
Leave a comment
“Ban airplanes. Yes, all of them.”
The venerable New Republic recently published an anti-gun diatribe by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, a young writer living in Toronto. Her essay is provocatively titled “It’s time to ban guns. Yes, all of them.” Not satisfied with just banning guns, we … Continue reading
Posted in Law, Logical Fallacies
Leave a comment
“La trampa de Gödel” (Venezuela edition)
Not long ago we published a formal paper titled Gödel’s Loophole in which we identify and distinguish between Gödelian and non-Gödelian design defects in the U.S. Constitution, loopholes that could potentially lead to the creation of a constitutional dictatorship within the existing … Continue reading
Posted in Law, Logical Fallacies, Politics
1 Comment
Questions regarding the 13th Amendment
Happy Anniversary! On this day 150 years ago, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by the requisite number of U.S. States, including most (but not all) of the southern States that had left the Union and joined the rebel and pro-slavery … Continue reading
Posted in History, Law, Paradoxes
Leave a comment
prior probability 