prior probability

Jack M. Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, recently wrote an essay titled “How to regulate (and not regulate) social media.” (The full essay is available here, via the Journal of Free Speech Law.) Suffice it to say (for now) that his essay is part of a growing chorus of legal scholars calling for greater regulation of the Internet. These scholars, however, are guilty of committing the Nirvana Fallacy: they assume that public regulation will somehow magically produce optimal results or at least better results than the status quo. The late great Ronald Coase demolished this fallacy years ago, but because of Professor Balkin’s academic stature (he is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School), and because of my interest in social media and information technology law generally, starting tomorrow I will be taking a closer look at Balkin’s arguments and will be writing up a multi-part review of/response to Balkin’s essay.

Here is a link to the above Tweet; check out the full thread for various proposed solutions.

Check out this homage to the late great puzzle master Martin Gardner. Here is one of his mathematical puzzles: “Imagine heating a metal ring enough so it expands. What happens to the hole, does it get bigger or smaller?”

SLoG stands for State & Local Government Law Blog, and this new legal blog is available for your edification here. You’re welcome! (Hat tip: Brian Leiter.)

Once again, I am assigning the award-winning film “The Social Network,” along with episode 4 of “Tiger King,” in my business law survey course. (For your reference, see my Fall 2021 Syllabus, the first four pages of which are pictured below. Click on a specific image to see a larger version of that page.) This term, however, will most likely be the last time I assign “The Social Network,” which depicts the events leading up to the creation and meteoric rise of Facebook. In brief, I have three objections against this film. One is that the movie, as of August 31, is no longer available on Netflix. Another is that it is somewhat sexist, especially in light of today’s hyper-sensitive #MeToo environment. (“The Social Network” has no female leads and fails the infamous Bechdel test.) But my main objection is that this movie is now horribly dated. When the film was first released in 2010, Facebook was the darling of Silicon Valley — a scrappy little startup with a fun and innovative way to bring real-life friends closer together. Today, by contrast, Facebook has for all practical purposes become an evil Big Tech behemoth, along with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Though come to think of it, perhaps this real-life role reversal makes “The Social Network” more relevant than ever!

(a) Folium of Descartes, (b) Witch of Agnesi, (c) Cubical Parabola, (d) Semicubical Parabola, (e) Strophoid, and (f) Cissoid of Diocles

That is the title of my 2007 paper on judicial senility, which I am showcasing today as part of my “Throwback Thursday” series in which I feature my most “vintage” scholarly works. As an aside, my four-page paper on “Senile Justices” is one of only two “empirical” papers that I have ever written. (I will revisit my other empirical paper in a future post. My other works are either theoretical or historical in nature.)

In summary, inspired by the work of historian David Garrow, my paper attempts to measure the true extent of the problem of judicial decrepitude among the members of the Supreme Court of the United States since the court’s inception in 1789. After collecting and presenting the relevant data, I conclude (contra Garrow) that the incidence of judicial decrepitude is relatively infrequent and rare.

That is the title of this report by Laura Tedesco and Rut Diamint, which was just published in Foreign Affairs. (Alas, annoyingly, the article is paywalled, but you can obtain a link to an ungated version of the article by clicking on the “continue reading” icon and then entering your email address.) In any case, the key to understanding what is happening in Cuba today is to recognize the undeniable fact that the Cuban people are ruled by a gerontic and obsolete military dictatorship.