prior probability

One of the puzzles that has long captivated me is this: how should we measure “progress” in such normative or value-laden fields as law, art, and ethics? Aren’t such first-order values as justice, beauty, and right vs. wrong supposed to be timeless and universal? Along come Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison, who propose a new interdisciplinary field of progress studies. (See Cowen & Collison, “We need a new science of progress.”) To this end, I recently conducted a preliminary literature review on the subject of “legal progress” in Google Scholar. (Along with business ethics, my professional training and scholarly area of expertise is the philosophy of law, with a special interest in natural law.) Here is a small sampling of what I found in reverse chronological order:

1. “How is progress constructed in international legal scholarship” by Tilmann Altwicker & Oliver Diggelmann (2014). This excellent paper shows how the ideal of progress is “socially constructed” in the area of human rights and international law.
2. “Legal progress through pragma-dialectics?” by Hendrik Kaptein (2006). This technical paper explores the meaning of progress in the domains of logic and legal reasoning.
3. “Legal transitions, rational expectations, and legal progress” by Kyle D. Logue (2003). This excellent paper examines legal progress (as well as legal regress) from a law-and-economics perspective.
4. “Tradition, change, and the idea of progress in feminist legal thought” by Katharine T. Bartlett (1995). This fascinating paper explores “feminists concepts of progress” and the tension between tradition and change in law.
5. “Margarine: 100 years of technological and legal progress” by Stanley C. Miksta (1971). This technical paper equates legal progress with the enactment and subsequent repeal or modification of laws regulating the margarine industry.

In other words, there are multiple perspectives and many different ways of studying legal progress: progress in how an industry is regulated by law, progress in women’s rights, progress in the protection of property rights, progress in how lawyers and judges reason about law, etc. These multiple conceptions of legal progress thus pose a larger question: how should legal progress be defined or measured? Stay tuned: I will explore that question in my next few posts …

“Lady Justice Awakens” by Odin

According to Coasian economic theory, “transaction costs” are supposed to determine whether people will work as individuals or collectively as firms. But does this insight apply to science research? Via Nature: “Between 2009 and 2013, 573 manuscripts listing 1,000 co-authors or more were published, according to a report released on 4 December by the Institute for Scientific Information …. But that figure has risen to 1,315 papers over the past 5 years.” (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.)

Update (11:45am): Upon further reflection, to the extent scientific papers with hundreds or even thousands of co-authors are led by science labs such as CERN, maybe those types of projects can be compared to Coasian or centralized “firms.”

Check out this thoughtful essay/blog post by Jason Crawford, which is provocatively titled “Progress studies [is] a moral imperative.” Although I am generally skeptical of “moral imperatives” (after all, moral claims are hard, if not impossible, to test or falsify, and the time and resources devoted to studying progress–or any other subject, for that matter–could be devoted to any number of other socially-valuable and morally-salient projects), there are nevertheless many aspects of Jason’s short essay that I found useful and worth sharing. Among other things, Jason raises many important questions about the nature of progress and offers several specific yardsticks for measuring human progress (see chart below, for example). At the same time, this book review by Jessica Riskin contains a powerful critique of the chart pictured below. Enjoy!

Credit: Max Roser (hat tip: @jasoncrawford)

… or the primacy of methodology. One team of scientists (led by David Kroodsma) published a study in the journal Science that concluded 55 percent of the world’s oceans are affected by fishing. Another group (led by Ricardo Amoroso), using the same underlying data (!), reached a drastically different conclusion: the actual value is closer to 4 percent. Ed Yong thus poses the salient following question in this excellent essay in The Atlantic: “How could two groups [of data scientists] have produced such wildly different answers using the same set of data?” In a word: methodology.

Image Credit: Global Fishing Watch

Constance Grady (via Vox) explains how Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” which was released 25 years ago, finally reached #1 on Billboard’s official Hot 100 chart. (Here is the official announcement.) In brief, Mariah’s Christmas anthem was originally ineligible for the Hot 100 chart because it was first released as a noncommercial single, but then “a series of rule changes (older songs were ineligible until they weren’t; noncommercial singles were ineligible until they weren’t) pushed ‘All I Want’ on and off the Billboard charts every holiday season … until in 2017, it hit No. 9 on the Hot 100 and entered the top 10 for the first time. In 2018, it hit No. 3. Now, two years later and more acclaimed than ever thanks to its 25th anniversary, it’s finally reached No. 1 on the chart.” Enjoy … and Merry Christmas!

Mary Ann Carroll was one of the remarkable Florida Highwaymen artists–and the sole woman of this iconic group. Here is the official obituary. Below is one of her works:

Artist credit: M. A. Carroll

For your reference, this beautiful book (by Gary Monroe) is devoted to the life and work of Mary Ann Carroll. Here is an extended excerpt from Monroe’s book: Continue reading →

I must confess that I am not a fan of superhero movies (I have yet to see a single Marvel movie, for example, nor do I plan to), but I might make an exception for “Wonder Woman 1984” (based on the trailer below). The release date of this film is scheduled for 5 June 2020 (hat tip: @kottke).

Let’s conclude our analysis of Hohfeldian rights, shall we? Thus far, we have reviewed liberty rights (or legal privileges), legal powers, and immunities from authority. This leaves one last type of Hohfeldian entitlement: claim rights. For Hohfeld, broadly speaking, a legal right always creates a corresponding duty on someone else to act (or refrain from acting) in a certain manner. Again, contracts and property rights provide classic examples of claim rights. A party to a binding contract, for example, has a right to the other party’s performance under the contract or to some payment in lieu of performance, or stated in Hohfeldian terms, the other contracting party has the duty to perform or pay. Ditto property rights. If I have the right to possess a certain piece of property, others a duty to not interfere with my right of possession.

Furthermore, this reciprocal “right/duty” relationship is Hohfeld’s most original and important insight: every right creates a corresponding duty, and vice versa, every duty entails a corresponding right. In fact, every one of Hohfeld’s four types of entitlement creates reciprocal relationships. For example, if I have a liberty right to do X, others have a corresponding duty (Hohfeld would say a “no claim”) to prevent me from doing X. Likewise, if I have a power to create an entitlement, this power imposes a corresponding duty (Hohfeld would say a “liability”) on others to respect my entitlement. And lastly, if I enjoy an immunity from authority, others have a corresponding duty (Hohfeld would say a “disability”) to refrain from interfering with my immunity entitlement.

To sum up, every legal entitlement falls into one of these four categories (claim rights, liberties, powers, and immunities), and every one of these entitlements imposes reciprocal duties on others. Although Hohfeld uses different labels to describe these reciprocal duties, we must not lose sight of Hohfeld’s larger point. Also, we may want to quibble over Hohfeld’s four categories of rights, since some of these categories are often overlapping, but what we cannot dispute is that legal entitlements (however defined) create corresponding duties on others. This Hohfeldian insight also generates really big philosophical implications about the nature of law. Stay tuned, for I will explore these philosophical points next week …

Dymitruk, et al. (2018)

We interrupt our review of Hohfeldian rights to share this beautiful visualization (via Sky News) of the 12 Dec. 2019 United Kingdom general election results: