prior probability

Note: This post is in honor of my dear friend and kindred spirit, Carlos “Carlitos” del Valle, who died on Saturday, July 11, 2020.

Although (as I explained in a previous post) I did not meet Carlitos in person until April of 2007, it turns out–unbeknownst to me at the time!–that we had collaborated together on a special legal project years before–back in the spring of 2004. The project was an amicus brief in support of a petition for certiorari before the United States Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court eventually declined to hear our case (Vélez-Ortiz v. Rivera-Torres, 341 F.3d 86 (1st Cir. 2003), cert. denied, 541. U.S. 972 (2005)), I would like to take a moment to reflect on our collaboration.

First of all, how did I not know about Carlitos at this time? Truth be told, I was working on this brief pro bono on behalf of my mentor and friend, Pedro E. Ortiz-Alvarez, a legal giant who was the lead attorney for the Municipality of Sabana Grande, a small town in southwest Puerto Rico, and for Miguel Vélez-Ortiz, the mayor of this town at the time. (As an aside, one of the things this charming town is famous for is its “Pozo del Virgen,” pictured below.) Don Pedro asked me to write an amicus brief in this case, so I went to work. Inspired by the “Brandeis briefs” of yore, I dissected the qualified immunity standard from a “law and economics” perspective. (As as aside, I eventually converted my part of the brief into a traditional law review article titled “An Economic Analysis of the First Circuit’s Qualified Immunity Standard,” published in the Revista de Derecho Puertorriqueño, Vol. 45, No. 2 (2006), pp. 187-196. You can read my paper/brief here.)

Little did I know, however, that Carlitos was also working on part two our brief. In fact, I did not discover Carlitos’ Herculean contribution until Don Pedro sent me the final version of the brief! And lo and behold, it turns out we made an great legal duo. While part one of the brief (my part) was full of facts and figures and economic theories, part two (Carlitos’s part) was a doctrinal tour de force. Carlitos laid out all the relevant caselaw, distinguishing all the previously-decidedly cases that hurt our cause and drawing direct analogies to all the cases that helped us. More importantly, Carlitos unwittingly taught me a decisive lesson about the law. Although theory makes the academic world go around, legal theory needs to work in tandem with legal doctrine if you want to change the law. So, no matter how bad the existing state of affairs in any given area of law is (and the qualified immunity doctrine is a case in point!), judges take stare decisis seriously, and they will base their decisions on previous cases …

Carlitos would go onto to impact my scholarship in many other ways. I will describe those extra-powerful impacts soon. In the meantime, thank you, Carlitos. You will not be forgotten.

My friend of many years Gustavo Gelpi, the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, knew Carlos del Valle for even more time than I did. Judge Gelpi wrote up a short eulogy in honor of Carlitos (once again, pictured below) and has graciously granted me permission to repost his eulogy here:

“Carlitos Del Valle, as all who knew him came to call him, was the quintessential idealist. He never saw ‘The Law’ as a mere profession or way to make a living. Rather, he saw it as an instrument that can bring great social change or reform; as a means to help the otherwise powerless or less fortunate; as a David to challenge the Governmental Goliath. To him ‘The Law’ was his very essence and purpose in life.

“I knew Carlitos for three decades. During that time there were periods when he represented the Commonwealth Government and there were others where he represented plaintiffs with civil rights claims against the Government. While indeed a zealous advocate regardless which side he was on, he always presented broader issues than those most other lawyers would raise.

“Back in 2008 I presided over an important case involving the Commonwealth’s noncompliance with the Medicaid statute. As counsel for the Government, Carlitos prevented his client from being found in contempt and ensured that all pending payments be made. Any other attorney would have settled for said result, but not him. Rather, he proceeded to go beyond that and literally indicted the United States Government for disparately treating United States citizens in Puerto Rico as it pertains to federal health benefits. He thus asked the Court to rule that the Insular Cases no longer applied to the Commonwealth. That was his typical self. He will certainly be missed.”

I will only add this to Judge Gelpi’s eulogy: More than any other man I knew, Carlitos truly embodied the spirit of Don Quijote–both for his idealism and willingness to tilt at powerful windmills.

In honor of my fellow bibliophile, dear friend, and scholarly colleague, Carlos del Valle (pictured below), here is a revised excerpt from one of my papers, which was published in 2015 in a special issue of the “Revista del Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico.” In this passage, I describe the first time I met Carlitos:

“Like the cluttered mailboxes of most academics, mine was flooded with scores of colloquia invitations and assorted ‘calls for papers.’ In those days, though, I had no travel budget to speak of, so most of these intriguing invitations, the equivalent of intellectual junk mail, would end up in the little black wastebasket tucked away under my old-school 1950s-era desk. But one academic invite stood out from the others.

“The invite described week-long conference devoted to “Blade Runner: Memory, Surveillance, and the Disposable Subject,” to be held the following spring (April 2007) at a small, independent law school … in the town of Mayagüez on the western end of the Island of Puerto Rico…. The organizer of the conference, Daniel Nina, not only accepted my proposal, he offered to provide me housing for the duration of the one-week conference. Daniel served as the indefatigable moderator and social host of the conference. His comments were always original, thoughtful, and politically incorrect when necessary, and his sharp wit as well as his mischievous sense of humor were a refreshing antidote to all those dull and boring academics who tend to take themselves and their work too seriously.

“During the conference, I ended up staying in the home of one of Daniel’s colleagues on the Mayagüez law school faculty, Carlitos de Valle. But who was this Carlitos de Valle? During the first night of my stay, I did not see much of my generous host, as he was holed up in his quarters on the upper level of his home, putting the finishing touches on his paper.

“Nevertheless, I immediately sensed that Carlitos was a kindred spirit, a man of ideas, a fellow intellectual agnostic, the moment I had walked through the door of his humble abode. The walls were lined with plain wood bookshelves, and the bookshelves were filled with books. There were books in the living room, books in the dining room, books in the bedrooms. Like Ernest Hemingway’s tropical Finca Vigía on the outskirts of Havana, Carlitos’s home was overflowing with well-worn books of all shapes and sizes. It was as if his home were one big Borgesian library.

“Amid this spiraling collection of books, I experienced yet another intellectual epiphany, perhaps my most important one. You see, Carlitos had collected and read many of the same books and authors that I had. His home was in many ways a larger version of my own small ramshackle Miramar apartment. But missing from Carlitos’s hallowed shelves were the trilogy of tomes of my own intellectual heroes–Thomas Schelling, Ronald Coase, and Richard Dawkins.

“That’s when it hit me all of a sudden! How many essential books were still missing from the bookshelves of my own meager Miramar library? What unread books were still waiting to be read? The books one has yet to read might just be as important as the books one has actually read.”

To sum up, Carlitos was not only a beloved law professor, he was also a scholar’s scholar, a lover of truth, and a true friend. In the next day or two, I will describe our first professional collaboration together: the time we co-authored a legal brief in support of a petition for certiorari before the United States Supreme Court.

Below is a recent photograph of my fellow bibliophile and chess aficcionado Carlos del Valle. Alas, I learned yesterday that my dear friend, colleague, and kindred spirit has suddenly passed away, and I am literally heart-broken over this unexpected news. I will say more about our friendship and Carlitos’s enormous impact on my own intellectual development in the next day or two. In the meantime, however, check out this letter in the form of a law review article, which I addressed to Carlitos many years ago.

Hello. Because this is a one-man blog, and because I will be taking a vacation for the rest of July and for most of August, I will be blogging much more sporadically, if at all, during the next few weeks. Rest assured, however, that I will present my grand synthesis of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s prediction theory of law and H.L.A. Hart’s internal point of view upon my return in late August or early September. Note: I won’t really be “on vacation” per se; instead, I will be using this time to give talks (via Zoom, of course) at several academic conferences and to complete some other scholarly projects, including a book-length treatment of “Goedel’s Loophole.” (If time permits, I may blog about these other projects in the days ahead.)

Because I teach business law, I am interrupting my series of blog posts about H.L.A. Hart’s influential theory of law to share this fascinating map (circa 2018) with the world. Hat tip: u/OttoOnTheFlippside (via Reddit). As an aside, compare the map below with this population map of the USA, also to scale.