prior probability

Before I begin blogging about legal positivism, I want to go on the record and send the following succinct message to the Florida Board of Bar Examiners: it’s time to pull your heads out of the sand and cancel the in-person July bar exam. Students who graduated from an ABA-accredited law school should be awarded a provisional license to practice law, subject to good behavior. (Full disclosure: Although I am licensed to practice law in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico 🇵🇷, I am a law professor in the State of Florida.)

My friend and colleague Josh Blackman writes, “Would a constitutional challenge to a mask-mandate be viable? Under Jacobson v. Massachusetts the answer is no. Is Jacobson consistent with a century of Due Process Clause jurisprudence? No. Several judges have already begun to cast doubt on that precedent.” (FYI: here is the Wikipedia entry for the Jacobsen case.) For his part, Professor David Super explains why the First and Ninth Amendments in the original Bill of Rights might protect one’s right to refuse to wear a mask, even in a pandemic. Alas, my dear law professor colleagues are, as usual, “overthinking” this question. The central issue here is, Can the government require you to wear a mask in public? Outside of federal enclaves like Washington, D.C., the federal government simply does not have the power to compel to people to wear masks under any reasonable reading of the Commerce Clause (the source of most of the Congress’s modern-day powers). State governments, however, have a general police power to protect the health, safety, and morals of its residents. End of discussion, right?

(With apologies to Madonna.) While many of you are fast asleep or binging on contemporary Netflix shows, I have been staying up late all week savoring many film noir classics. Last night, for example, the Movies! TV Network broadcasted the 1945 film noir “Detour” at 3:00AM Eastern!

I will resume blogging next week about my European travels (Paris and Venice) as well as about legal positivism. In the meantime, now that I am done with teaching until the fall, I will be turning my full attention to my modest pile of unread or partially-read books pictured below:

Note: In the oval picture frame to the left, yours truly is pictured with Hilary Hemingway, one of the great Ernest Hemingway’s nieces, who. I had the honor of meeting in May of 2003 at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, Cuba.

Following up on my previous post, below are four nocturnal snapshots from my 2019 summer sojourn with Sydjia in the City of Light. Faites-vous plaisir!

Last year on this day my wife and I arrived in Paris, where I attended Brian Leiter’s summer seminar on legal positivism. I will finally get around to blogging about Professor Leiter’s excellent seminar soon …

What if the leaders of the world got together and agreed to build a universal metro system for the entire globe? Via Reddit (u/picrazy2): “Presenting MetroWorld … a network of 276 stations and 11 lines, with 11 hubs and 11 super-hubs.”

Here is a larger version of this wonderful world metro map, and here is a detailed description of the logic and design choices that went into the making of the map. What foreign city would you visit first? (For me, it would be Cape Town!)

This summer was the first time I have ever taught a course online from start to finish, and somehow, I ended up having a wonderful experience recording my low-budget videos and using Tiger King to explore the legal and ethical environments of business. My summer course ended a few days ago, so I recorded a farewell video for my students (see below). In this video I talk about two of my favorite contemporary athletes–Tim Tebow and Mike Tyson–and discuss some life lessons we can learn from them. (As an aside, here is Tim Tebow’s first “Spring Training” home run, which I had the honor of seeing in person last February!)