prior probability

In addition to my many substantive refereed papers, law review articles, and book chapters (see here, for example), I have also authored a small handful of scholarly “micro-papers” over the years, i.e. published works consisting of three paragraphs or less. For reference, my most noteworthy mini-publications are listed in reverse chronological order below:

• Betting on Conspiracies?, Journal of Brief Ideas (July 17, 2021).
• Kant on Evidence: A Hypothetical Reply to Kerr, Green Bag 2d, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer, 2019), pp. 281-282.
• Bayesian Judges, Journal of Brief Ideas (December 28, 2019).
• Bayesian Verdicts, Journal of Brief Ideas (March 1, 2018).
• Research Fraud as Tort, Science, Vol. 349, No. 6255 (Sep. 25, 2015), pp. 1459-1460.
• Time-Travel Thought Experiment, Science, Vol. 341, No. 6141 (Jul. 5, 2013), pp. 28-29.
• Is stare decisis a sand castle?, Arizona State Law Journal (Oct. 1, 2012).
• Public Trust Doctrine: Too Broad?, Science, Vol. 326, No. 5949 (Oct. 2, 2009), pp. 45-46.

In addition to my scholarly research (law review articles, book chapters, etc.), I have also authored a few papers about teaching, including a law review article (“Teaching Tiger King”), a refereed paper (“So Long Sucker”), and a game book for an in-class role-play game (“Hacking Harvard”). Details are below:

• Teaching Tiger King, Saint Louis University Law Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Spring 2021), pp. 527-560. This fun paper explains how I redesigned business law and ethics survey course from scratch when my home institution moved all instruction online in the spring of 2020 in response to the global pandemic. (In summary, I decided to focus on the popular docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness in order to make my online course as relevant, timely, and engaging as possible.)
• “So Long Suckers”: Bargaining and Betrayal in Breaking Bad, The Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2019), pp. 1-15. I wrote this paper to help my fellow college instructors convey strategic concepts and impart negotiation skills to their students through a four-person bargaining contest called “So Long Sucker” (see here), a board game that was invented in 1950 by four of the greatest game theorists of all time: Mel Hausner, John Nash, Lloyd Shapley, and Martin Shubik.
• Hacking Harvard: Law, Ethics, and the Dawn of the Facebook Era (2016). This is a general “game book” for a Reacting to the Past (RTTP) role-play game that I developed for my business law and ethics honors section at the University of Central Florida. This particular reacting game is centered around the Facemash hacking incident that occurred at Harvard in the fall of 2003. (For more information about this role-play method of teaching, see here and here.)

And from time to time, I have also made a few additional contributions (such as this one) to Faculty Focus, a semi-annual in-house journal published by my home institution’s Faculty Center.

In all, I have been invited to make contributions to a handful of scholarly books (see below), including (1) The Godfather and Philosophy; (2) Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson, et EJW cetera; (3) Better Call Saul and Philosophy; (4) Economics of the Undead; and (5) Blade Runner: memoria, vigilancia y el sujeto desechable (in Spanish). Writing a chapter for a book, however, involves a delicate trade off: on the one hand, your work can reach a wider audience, especially if the book is intended for the general public (my chapter for The Economics of the Undead, for example, was featured on Freakonomics Radio!), but at the same time book chapters are much harder for potential readers to find or access online compared to journal articles. For reference, then, here are links to preprints of my book chapters (in reverse chronological order):

• Ronald Coase and the Corleones, Chapter 22 of Joshua Heter and Richard Greene, editors, The Godfather and Philosophy: An Argument You Can’t Refute, pp. 209-214. Chicago: Open Universe (2023). This chapter extends Ronald Coase’s idea of “reciprocal harms” to the famous wedding scene in the original Godfather movie.
• Adam Smith in Love, Chapter 7 of Daniel B. Klein and Jason Briggeman, editors, Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson, et EJW cetera, pp. 154-185. Vancouver: CL Press (2022). This chapter is a reprint of my original refereed “Adam Smith in Love” paper.
• Breaking Bad Promises, Chapter 22 of Joshua S. Heter and Brett Coppenger, editors, Better Call Saul and Philosophy: I Think Therefore I Scam, pp. 227-235. Chicago: Open Universe (2022). This chapter explores a peculiar puzzle in legal and moral theory: the problem of illegal or immoral promises.
• Buy or Bite?, Chapter 12 of Glen Whitman & James Dow, editors, Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science, pp. 123-129. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield (2014). This chapter introduces the concept of “legal failure” and proposes a free market for the purchase and sale of blood.
• El ajedrez in Blade Runner: lecciones de la Partida Inmortal, Chapter 7 of Daniel Nina, editor, Blade Runner: memoria, vigilancia y el sujeto desechable, pp. 105-130. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón (2008). This chapter explores the logic of strategic behavior through the lens of the legendary 1851 “Immortal Game” between two great German chess masters, Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky.

I surveyed some of my previous scholarly works earlier this year, including my probability theory papers, my Coase papers, my Gödel papers as well as my first few scholarly papers, my game theory models, and my turn to legal history. Today, I will survey my book reviews. To the point, I have read a lot of books since I became a law professor, and if one includes my many multi-part write-ups and micro-reviews on this blog (see here, for example) or my sundry informal reviews on Amazon (here), I have probably reviewed several dozens of scholarly books in all. Below, however, are the most notable reviews I have written, in reverse chronological order. (Nota bene: an asterisk indicates an unpublished review.)

1. *Mixed reviews of two new books about Adam Smith, Robin Paul Malloy’s Law and the Invisible Hand: A Theory of Adam Smith’s Jurisprudence and Paul Sagar’s Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics (2024).
2. Mixed review of Ryan Patrick Hanley’s book Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (2023).
3. Positive review of Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, A Sheer Excess of Powers (2023).
4. *Mixed review of Tyler Cowen’s book Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (2020).
5. Critical review of Randy J. Kozel’s book Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent (2019).
6. Critical review of Nathan B. Oman’s book The Dignity of Commerce (2017).
7. Positive review of Ullica Segerstråle’s biography of W. D. Hamilton, Nature’s Oracle (2014).
8. Positive review of Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert O. Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher (2014).
9. Mixed review of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (2012).
10. *Critical review of David Garrow’s law review article “Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28th Amendment” (2007).

One last thing (for now): my most recent reviews (see items #1 and #2 above) revolve around the ideas and works of Adam Smith. As I have mentioned previously, the Scottish philosopher-economist has taken up most of my scholarly attention since the summer of 2020, so stay tuned, for I will have much more to say about my rediscovery of Adam Smith soon …

Check out this 13-minute TED Talk by philosopher Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, who explains why AI tools like ChatGPT are a virtual Trojan horse: they look like promising solutions to pressing problems but only end up making those same problems worse! He also presents a set of questions to help us guide future decisions on our use of AI. (See also “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” as well as this more alarmist thread.)

In honor of our new pontiff Leo XIV, who studied mathematics at Villanova University:

David Hume once wrote, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” (Hume, Of Miracles.) But what about religious claims or paranormal beliefs, i.e. claims where physical evidence is disputed or lacking? Are people who believe in ghosts, telepathy, UFO sightings, alien abductions, etc. (see here, for example) foolish? To this end, I have converted my recent blog posts on Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel into a formal paper — “Belief and Evidence: David Hume in the Library of Babel” — and have just posted my new paper to SSRN. This work is dedicated to my colleague and friend, Todd French (Rollins College), who brought to my attention two books that have ended up having a profound impact on my thinking on these questions: Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible (2010), and Tanya Luhrman, When God Talks Back (2012). More generally, French, Kripal, and Luhrman have caused me to rethink my Humean priors regarding the relationship between evidence and belief.

Why do I even need an ID (i.e. internal passport) at all to travel inside my own country? Bonus question: How many more erosions of liberty (anti-smoking rules, seat belt laws, etc.) before we stop being a “free” country?

Via Vatican News: “The upcoming Conclave starting on May 7 to elect the 267th Pope will be the 76th in the form we know today, which was established by Pope Gregory X in 1274, and the 26th held under the gaze of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.” See also this 2013 report by Jason Horowitz, via The Washington Post.