Category Archives: Uncategorized
Film noir forever
Happy Sunday! I put together a home-made photographic collage of some of the leading gents and dames of film noir. (Here is my previous film noir collage.) You’re welcome …
A modest proposal (two-week-holiday-in-honor-of-freedom edition)
Why don’t we make the two weeks between June 19 (Juneteenth) and July 4 (Independence Day), inclusive, a two-week national holiday for all non-essential workers? No schools, no commerce, no work. The French, for example, have the whole of August … Continue reading
Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Paragraph
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
Hamilton meets hip hop
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
The umbrella test
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
Popper’s revenge (Kelsen’s glue, part 2)
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
Kelsen’s Glue
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
Tyrannosaurus Thursday
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.
Teaching Tiger King
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

