prior probability

I dedicate this post to my wife Sydjia. On this day (August 4) in 1693, Dom Pierre Pérignon is said to have invented the Devil’s wine: champagne. (See here, for example.) Cheers!

I blogged about my latest legal-philosophical foray into popular culture (the wedding scene in the original Godfather movie) in my previous post. That Godfather post then got me to thinking about my previous “pop culture” papers. In all, ten of my scholarly works have been inspired by popular culture and other forms of mass-market entertainment, including sci-fi, vampire lit, and literary fan art, just to name a few. For your reference, below is a complete listing, in chronological order, of my “pop law” papers:

1. Time scarcity in Blade Runner: Clones and the Coase Theorem (2011) (with Orlando Martinez-Garcia)
2. Violence in the vampire lit genre: Buy or Bite? (2013)
3. The law and economics of two versions of the trolley problem: Trolley Problems (2014)
4. The law and ethics of the “facemash incident” (The Social Network): Hacking Harvard (2016)
5. Bargaining and betrayal in Breaking Bad: So Long Suckers (2018)
6. The law and economics of literary fan art (with examples from The Old Man and the Sea): Of Coase and Copyrights (2019)
7. “The Little Rock Nine”: Domestic Constitutional Violence (2019)
8. Animals and online ed: Teaching Tiger King (2021)
9. Illegal agreements in Better Call Saul: Breaking Bad Promises (2022)
10. The wedding scene in The Godfather: Coase and the Corleones (2023)

The Godfather premiered fifty years ago in March of 1972. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the wide domestic release of this classic film, I just posted an essay to SSRN titled “Coase and the Corleones“. By way of background, one of the most influential ideas in legal, moral, and political philosophy is John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, i.e. the notion that people should be free to do or say whatever they wish unless their actions or words cause harm to somebody else. The work of Ronald Coase, however, shows us why the harm principle is logically incoherent. Aside from the difficulty of defining what counts as a harm, the main problem with the harm principle is that harms are often reciprocal in nature. That is, most harms are, logically speaking, either the direct or indirect result of both the wrongdoer’s and the victim’s decisions. In my Godfather paper (see here), I illustrate this counter-intuitive Coasean picture of harms using three memorable examples from the famous wedding scene in original Godfather movie.

Although the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, most of the delegates to the Continental Congress did not sign this historic document until August 2, 1776! More fun facts about the Declaration of Independence are available here, via the National Archives. (For example, Reese Witherspoon, the actress who played the role of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, is a direct descendant of John Witherspoon, one of the 56 patriots who signed the 1776 Declaration.)

FYI, the following books are available online for free:

1. Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Deborah G. Mayo. (This book is available online for free from August 1-31 at this link.)

2. Introduction to Utilitarianism: An Online Textbook (Oxford University Press, 2022) by William MacAskill, Richard Yetter Chappell, and Darius Meissner.

3. Also, check out “Project Gutenberg“, an online library containing over 60,000 free eBooks.

I returned from Colombia last week and am now getting ready to visit Jamaica. In the meantime, here are a few additional photos from Bogota, one of my top-ten favorite cities in the world:

Via the popular Marginal Revolution blog, my colleague and friend Alex Tabarrok recently brought to my attention this prize-winning essay, which is provocatively titled “Drone Airspace: A New Global Asset Class“. The essay was written by Brent Skorup (pictured below), a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a visiting faculty fellow at the Governance and Technology Center of the University of Nebraska, who proposes the creation of “airspace markets” for commercial drone services. In the words of Mr Skorup, “With airspace markets, winning bidders win the exclusive license to manage, combine, and sublease air corridors. Importantly, operators have the freedom to iterate and to use the drone traffic management systems and technologies of their choice (subject to generally applicable FAA safety rules like separation minimums and emergency procedures).” Yes, what an excellent and innovative idea! My only criticism is that this proposal does not go far enough. Specifically, why not extend airspace markets to commercial satellites in outer space? See here, for example.

Via Brian Leiter, I recently discovered this excellent essay by Robert Cummins, a former philosophy professor who now writes detective novels. To the point, Dr Cummins’ essay presents a slam-dunk refutation of “reflective equilibrium,” a feeble, if not totally bogus, method of reasoning that is nevertheless popular among professional philosophers and some academic lawyers. In brief, there are two reasons why “reflective equilibrium” is bullshit. One is moral pluralism (my term). When people have different moral intuitions, no amount of individual or collective “reflection” will change that. The other reason has to do with the non-falsifiable nature (in a Popperian sense) of our moral intuitions. As a result, there is no way of “calibrating” or testing the intellectual outputs derived from this method of reasoning.

My colleague and friend Jimena Hurtado interviewed Tyler Cowen on 12 July in Bogota, Colombia. Although this informative interview is less than 10 minutes long, among other things Professor Cowen explains why he read The Wealth of Nations at age 14!