prior probability

I am happy to report that my short piece “Kant on Evidence: A Hypothetical Reply to Kerr” will finally be published in Volume 22, Issue #4 of The Green Bag (2d Series), which also happens to be my all-time favorite law journal, so this minor feat is a dream come true.

Check out this essay by Minda Zetlin explaining the ordering of adjectives. Among other things, her essay brought Mark Forsyth’s beautiful book The Elements of Eloquence to our attention. In his book (see screenshot below) Forsyth gives the following memorable example to illustrate the logic of adjectives: “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.” Simply put, one cannot move the order of any of those adjectives without having the sentence sound completely wrong. According to Forsyth, there are eight types of adjectives, and they should be used in the following order:

1. Opinion

2. Size

3. Age

4. Shape

5. Color

6. Origin

7. Material

8. Purpose

You tell me! Aside from the government, what with the unethical practices of many Departments of Motor Vehicles and the proliferation of license plate readers, not to mention the mass surveillance programs of the so-called National Security Agency, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are the personification of evil, but who wins silver and bronze? The case against Microsoft is here. The case against Google, here.

Although Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have petitioned for Statehood multiple times, neither the House nor the Senate has acted on these petitions. Why not? In Senator Mitch McConnell’s case, the reason is probably some combination of racism and politics: Senator McConnell is a member of the Republican Party, so he might reasonably fear that Puerto Rico and D.C. would tilt the balance of political power in the U.S. Senate by electing a cohort of four racial and ethnic minorities–two of them Spanish-speaking and all of them Democrats–to that august body. Still, this theory does not explain Nancy Pelosi’s inaction. (Also, the case of D.C. might require a constitutional amendment, since it is a federal enclave under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.)

Check out this New Yorker essay by Corey Robin about Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Here is an excerpt:

When [Justice Thomas] joined the bench, on October 19, 1991, the Soviet Union was a country, Hillary Clinton was Arkansas’s First Lady, and Donald Trump had recently declared the first of his businesses’ six bankruptcies. Since then, Thomas has written more than seven hundred opinions, staking out controversial positions on gun rights and campaign finance that have come to command Supreme Court majorities. “Thomas’s views,” the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has said, “are now being followed by a majority of the Court in case after case.” That was in 2011. Today Thomas is joined on the Court by Neil Gorsuch, who frequently signs on to Thomas’s opinions, and Brett Kavanaugh. 

Image credit: Shannon Henderson

The full article by Zachary Crockett is available here.

If you have ever wondered what is the most famous (or infamous) crime that was committed in each one of our 50 States, check out this list compiled by NYT contributors Tina Jordan and Ross MacDonald.

Image Credit: Ross MacDonald