That is the title of this short paper by John Mikhail, a professor at Georgetown Law School. (Hat tip: @lsolum.) Here are the first few sentences of Professor Mikhail’s intriguing new paper:
“Most originalists are legal positivists, not natural lawyers. By contrast, the [Founding Fathers], by and large, were natural lawyers, not legal positivists. A non-trivial problem thus appears built into the nature of originalism, at least as it is conceived by many scholars and judges. At bottom, originalism rests on a series of ontological and jurisprudential assumptions at odds with the belief systems of early Americans—the people who actually framed and ratified the Constitution.”
Suffice it to say, given my natural law background, I am going to add this paper to my reading list–as well as this excellent essay by Jonathan Gienapp on “Written Constitutionalism”, to which Mikhail’s paper is responding to–and will report back soon …
I understand that TWC and other news outlets want to sell ads in order to make money off this event, but for the love of God and all things holy, stop over-hyping Tropical Storm Elsa! See, for example, this AP News report stating that “[t]here were no early reports of serious damage as Elsa passed over Cuba.”
Update (7/6): I have now finished reading the excellent books by Jim Garrison and Cynthia Saltzman. (See my June 29 blog post below.) These books were so good I want to say a few words about each.
Let’s start with Saltzman. Her book retells the story of how so many works of looted art ended up in the famous Louvre museum in Paris, including Paolo Veronese’s “The Wedding Feast at Cana.” In brief, France stole these works of art after Napoleon’s various military victories across Europe in the late 1790s and early 1800s, but Saltzman also raises an intriguing legal and moral question. Specifically, since most of the stolen works of art that populate the Louvre were ceded by treaty after Napoleon’s victories, should this fact (the existence of a treaty) make any difference as to the legality of Napoleon’s thefts, or are these various treaties themselves null and void because they were imposed by military force?
Next, let’s turn to Garrison, who was the D.A. of New Orleans from 1962 to 1973. His fascinating book is about his three-year investigation into the JFK assassination and the case he brought against Clay Shaw, charging him with conspiracy in the murder of JFK. While the evidence against Clay Shaw is mostly circumstantial, consisting of the testimony of various witnesses who say they saw Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald together in the months before the assassination, Garrison nevertheless presents a compelling case that Oswald was framed and that JFK’s murder was the result of a conspiracy. I visited the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza two months ago, but I don’t recall if there was any mention of Jim Garrison or Clay Shaw at that museum. If not, this omission needs to be corrected promptly.
Now that I have completed my summer session teaching duties, I will be free to focus on my research and writing for the rest of the summer. Among other things, I am writing up a new paper tentatively titled “The Leibniz Conspiracy” (about which I will be blogging about in the next day or two), and I am reading the following works:
Jim Garrison, On the Trail of Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy, available here. Since my wife and I visited the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in May (a museum devoted to the events of Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas), I have immersed myself in the Zapruder film and JFK conspiracy theories. Along with the movies “Parkland” and “JFK”, this is the third book I have read on the subject since the month of May!
50 years ago today, Louis Armstrong made his final reel-to-reel tape. After concluding it with “April in Paris” from the “Ella and Louis” album, he went to sleep and passed away. This video contains the final minute of “April in Paris,” directly transferred from that last tape. pic.twitter.com/9zq9jWtiPj
Everyone is saying how a fan caused a major accident at the Tour de France last week. (See video below of the incident.) But as Ronald Coase would say, isn’t the risk of accidents on the Tour de France a “reciprocal problem”? That is, one could just as well argue that the cyclists were as much to blame for the accident as the hapless fan was, since a cyclist riding on the edge of the road knows ahead of time that a fan might obstruct their right of way. Coase’s counter-intuitive theory of reciprocal risks is so versatile and wide-ranging that I have used it to describe “the battle of the replicants” in the original Blade Runner film (see here) as well as the “right to recline” your seat in economy class steerage on commercial flights (see here).
Personally, out of respect for our Native Americans, I have decided to stop celebrating the Fourth of July, but that said, I still admire the original design of Betsy Ross’s flag and the Jeffersonian ideal that all men are created equal and have natural and non-transferable (i.e. “inalienable”) rights.
You may have already heard that track and field star Sha’Carri Richardson (pictured below) has had to apologize for testing positive for marijuana. (If not, see here or here, for example.) But truth be told, this is absolute and unmitigated bullshit because the wrong person apologized for this unfair situation. Simply put, it is the US Olympic Committee (Team USA) that should be apologizing to Ms Richardson and to her fans and that should be taking all necessary steps to allow her to compete in the 100 meter dash at the upcoming Olympics!
You may have heard of “prediction markets” such as Intrade, the Iowa Electronic Market (IEM) or the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), but what about a “retrodiction market”, where you can bet on the truth values of past events. Here is an excerpt from my paper “Betting on Conspiracies” (footnotes omitted):
“Why frame conspiracy theories as wagers or bets? Instead of pointless debates with ‘true believers’, instead of talking past each other, as my colleague and friend Paras Chopra has noted in this excellent Twitter thread, allowing people to place bets on their beliefs has the following advantages:
(a) Betting markets provide people a financial and reputational incentive to place winning bets. Generally speaking, the act of placing a bet encourages the voicing of informed contrarian opinions; at the same time, the possibility of financial loss — i.e. the fact that market participants have ‘skin in the game’ — discourages and penalizes the voicing of non-informed opinions.
(b) Betting markets scale well with the number of people and opinions.
(c) Most importantly, betting markets are able to efficiently aggregate disparate sources of information.
Simply put, a betting market allows all points of views to be included and aggregated. Call this advantage ‘cognitive diversity’, or in the words of one source, ‘when dealing with complex issues involving many variables or moving parts, no one can claim to have a complete model or theory from which to make fail-safe predictions. More likely everyone has a partial understanding of the situation, further clouded by his own biases. But when all these partial, biased models are put together, a wonderful thing happens: knowledge accumulates, gaps get filled, while the various biases cancel each other.’ In other words, a group’s collective model is generally more accurate than any individual model. A retrodiction market would harness this cognitive diversity, because anyone who disagrees with the current consensus has a profit motive to participate in the market.”
That is the title of my latest work-in-progress, available here via SSRN. The subtitle of my paper is: Lessons from Kurt Gödel and the Leibniz Conspiracy. Here is the introduction to my paper (footnotes omitted):
“Was Kurt Gödel right about the existence of a secret conspiracy to conceal the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz? Did a small circle of sinister scholars somehow suppress some obscure works by Leibniz? Today, the German polymath Leibniz is known for his co-discovery–independently of Sir Isaac Newton–of the calculus, his metaphysical theory of monads, and his ‘best of all possible worlds’ doctrine, which was famously criticized by the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire in his classic 1759 satirical novella Candide. But according to the logician Kurt Gödel, the target of this secret anti-Leibniz plot was G. W. Leibniz’s single-most revolutionary and ambitious idea, an idea that inspired Gödel’s own contributions to mathematics and logic: Leibniz’s proposed universal language or characteristica universalis. Alas, Gödel’s alleged Leibniz Conspiracy raises more questions than it answers. Who would want to suppress the characteristica universalis, and why? And whatever their motives and identities, how could such a deep thinker like Gödel fall for such a far-fetched and improbable conspiracy theory?
“The remainder of this paper will thus be organized as follows: Part I will describe the “Leibniz Conspiracy” from Kurt Gödel’s point of view. By all accounts, Gödel created the Leibniz Conspiracy after spending countless hours researching the works of Leibniz and discovering significant gaps in the German philosopher’s published works. Next, Part II will explore the internal logic of conspiracy theories, using Franz Neumann’s classic work on ‘Anxiety and Politics’ as my point of departure. Part III will then explore a wide variety of ‘conspiracy theory theories.’ After all, if someone like Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, could fall for a conspiracy theory, perhaps conspiracy thinking is more widespread than commonly believed. Part IV will then survey some recent proposals for combatting conspiracy theories or mitigating their negative effects and explain why these proposed ‘solutions’ are generally worse than the conspiracy-thinking disease they are trying to cure. Accordingly, Part V will make a novel proposal–the creation of a Conspiracy Theory Betting Market. In brief, a betting market would aggregate all available information about the truth values of various conspiracy theories by allowing people to bet on their beliefs about past events.”
Left image: “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German Mathematician.” Source: Science Photo Library. Middle image: “Diagram of the Characteristica Universalis.” Source: Wikimedia Commons. Right image: KURT GODEL (Watercolor on Paper) by LAUTIR. Source: Saatchi Art.
