prior probability

What’s up, doc? The first edition of Book One of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha), the first modern novel according to Harold Bloom, was published on this day in 1605 in Madrid.

Update (1/17): The paper is now posted on SSRN.

That is the title of my most recent scholarly paper, which I am currently in the process of editing and which will be published in a symposium issue of the Arkansas Law Review this spring. I will be posting an open-access draft of my paper on SSRN (and on this blog) later this week, but in the meantime, here is my abstract:

My paper reframes the 1957 Little Rock Crisis as a paradigm case of domestic constitutional violence, i.e. the power and duty of the president to use military force to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. First, my paper revisits two obscure Little Rock cases that unsuccessfully attempted to challenge the legality of President Eisenhower’s decision to send paratroopers to Arkansas to desegregate Central High School. Although neither case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, they pose important questions about the legality of domestic constitutional violence in disputes over the meaning of the Constitution. Next, my article explores some potential sources of law authorizing the use of constitutional violence. In brief, there is an over 200-year body of law regulating the use of domestic constitutional violence. On the one hand, the Constitution itself anticipates the possibility of “domestic Violence”; on the other, the Congress has delegated a specific set of powers to the president to deal with certain classes of domestic dangers. Lastly, I conclude by proposing that we call this body of law “the laws of national necessity.”

And two old scholarly papers! Here is what I am reading to begin the new year:

1. Biography/Chess: Tim Crothers, The Queen of Katwe (2013).
2. Biography/Religion: Fiona MacMath, editor, The Faith of Samuel Johnson (1990).
3. Comics: Corban Wilkin, Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea (2011).
4. Ethics: Edward J. Gracely, On the Noncomparability of Judgments Made by Different Ethical Theories, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 27, no. 3 (1996), pp. 327-332.
5. History: Robert W. Coakley, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1789-1878 (1988).
6. Law: John Leubsdorf, The Surprising History of the Preponderance Standard of Civil Proof, Florida Law Review, Vol. 67, no. 5 (2015), pp. 1569-1619.

Some scholars are beginning to advocate for a partial lottery system for the awarding of research grants, an idea that is long overdue in my humble opinion. Why? Among other things, because under a random allocation system a new researcher would have just as much probability of winning an award as an established or big-name researcher does. (See links below for more details. Hat tip: The Amazing Tyler Cowen.)

1. James Urton, How economic theory and the Netflix Prize could make research funding more efficient, via UW News.
2. Kevin Gross & Carl T. Bergstrom, Contest models highlight inherent inefficiencies of scientific funding competitions, via PLOS Biology.
3. Ferric C. Fang & Arturo Casadevall, Research funding: the case for a modified lottery, via mBio.
    

Credit: Fang & Casadevall

President Trump wants Congress to fund a border wall; the Democrats, who now have regained control of the House of Representatives, do not want to fund a border wall. Which side will “swerve” first? The Game of Chicken, along with the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Battle of the Sexes, is one of the ways in which this political conflict can be modeled. Here is the Wikipedia entry for the Game of Chicken; here is a memorable example of Chicken from the movie “Footloose”.

Bayesian Update (6pm/18h): As I replied to Kathy H. in the comments section, I find it fascinating that in this particular case the intransigence of both sides is due to their moralizing of the border wall, which suggests an inverse relationship between the ability to reach a pragmatic compromise and the strength of one’s moral convictions!