prior probability

If you are in the Orlando area, skip Disney and visit the Orlando Museum of Art instead. OMA is featuring a special exhibit on The Florida Highwaymen, a remarkable group of Afro-American painters from Ft Pierce, Florida who revolutionized the world of landscape painting.

If you don’t speak Spanish, you are missing out! (Kobe had five championship rings; the sixth ring in this moving musical tribute refers to Kobe’s wedding ring.) Update: here is a decent English translation of Bad Bunny’s lyrics.

Today (1/28) is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, who made many contributions to natural law theory. In addition, Aquinas attempted to synthesize the ideas of Aristotle with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The YouTube video below contains a good introduction to Aquinas’ life and ideas:

“Consent” is an indispensable legal and moral concept, but why? Check out Larry Solum’s excellent legal theory blog post on the legal and moral significance of consent. (Professor Solum’s post popped up recently on my Twitter feed. For periodic legal theory updates, follow @lsolum on Twitter.) Without further ado, here is an excerpt from Professor Solum’s helpful overview of consent theory: “In general, there are two families of theories about the nature of consent. One theory is that consent is a mental state—either an affective state such as desire or a volitional state such as choice. The second theory is that consent is a performative—a speech act in which one person agrees to something by communicating with another person (or persons). Each of these two approaches to consent requires some additional explanation.” Read more here.

My copy of Volume 9 of The Journal of Law just arrived in the mail! Among other things, this eclectic volume contains my paper on “The Case for Bayesian Judges,” which is also available here, via SSRN.