Category Archives: Uncategorized

Happy Independence Day? My friend, colleague, and fellow intellectual saboteur Alex Tabarrok has brought to my attention this deleted paragraph from an early draft of the original Declaration of Independence. I have also cut-and-pasted Jefferson’s lost paragraph below: [King George] … Continue reading →

Now available for the masses on Disney+. Aja Romano explains here why Hamilton is “impossible to pin down.” (Maybe this will help.) As an aside, my wife Sydjia and I had the honor of seeing the Hamilton musical on stage … Continue reading →

Via Quora: “Which two pictures, when compared, best capture the difference between Obama and Trump for you?” Me: How about these two? (Although in fairness to 45, there are plenty of pictures of 44 being selfish with his umbrella too. … Continue reading →

Alternative title: Calling bullshit (Hans Kelsen edition) We have been blogging about legal positivism all week, and we identified Hans Kelsen’s key contributions to legal theory in my previous post. In brief, one of Kelsen’s great insights is his structural … Continue reading →

Now that we have described John Austin’s command theory of law, or Legal Positivism 1.0 (see here), let us turn our attention to Legal Positivism 2.0–Hans Kelsen’s self-described “scientific” or “pure theory” of law. (Here is a short bio of … Continue reading →

Check out the 3D-printed T-Rex shower head pictured below, which is available for download for free from MakerBot’s Thingiverse. Hat tip: @pickover.

I am interrupting my series of blog posts on “legal positivism” to share my most recent work-in-progress, which is titled “Teaching Tiger King“–a rough draft of which is also available here via the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). I have … Continue reading →

What is “law”? And how can we distinguish law from morality? I identified three competing theories of legal positivism in a previous post. Here, I want to focus on the first of these theories, John Austin’s famous “command theory of … Continue reading →

One of my favorite blogs (View from the Back by Sheree) has a “Wordless Wednesday” category for photographs that need no further comment or elaboration. Sheree invited me to follow suit, but what if the object being photographed itself has … Continue reading →