prior probability

This video shows how the musician Calvin Harris created his lovely song “Slide”. What will you create in the new year?

Latin Americans like to celebrate Christmas Eve (Nochebuena) with their family and closest friends. That’s why 24 December is my favorite holiday tradition and my favorite day of the year.

It’s time to size up what we have been working on during this past year. In addition to my regular teaching duties, I worked on the following research projects:

1. Along with my colleagues Sean Melvin (Elizabethtown College) and David Orozco (Florida State), I contributed 12 chapters to a new textbook on “Business Law and Strategy.” (McGraw Hill Education, in press). Our textbook presents the standard topics of the business law curriculum–such as torts, contracts, corporate governance, etc.–from a strategic and game-theoretic perspective.

2. I attended the 2018 Fall Altheimer Symposium commemorating the 60th anniversary of Cooper v. Aaron, a leading school desegregation case. My talk explored the legality of President Eisenhower’s decision to send troops to Arkansas during the 1957 Little Rock Crisis. The symposium was hosted by the William H. Bowen School of Law of the University of Arkansas on 28 Sept. 2018 and I very much enjoyed my stay in Little Rock, especially my visit to Central High School. After the symposium, I wrote up a paper titled “Domestic Constitutional Violence” (CDV), which will be published in a symposium edition of the UALR Law Review. (I will be blogging more about my CDV paper soon.)

3. Earlier this year, I wrote up a formal review of Randy Kozel’s excellent book Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent (Cambridge University Press, 2017). My review, which is titled “The Problem with Precedent,” will be published overseas in The Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law. In the meantime, you can read an ungated version of my review here. (I also blogged about Kozel’s thought-provoking book earlier this year.)

4. During the summer months I also wrote up a law review article in which I present a Bayesian or probabilistic theory of stare decisis. Kozel’s book (see item #3 above) and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair in June of 2018 are what motivated me to write this paper, which is tentatively titled “Bitcoin, the Commerce Clause, and Bayesian Stare Decisis.” The paper will be published in a symposium edition of the Chapman University Law Review next year, and I will present my “Bayesian Stare Decisis” model of judging at the 21st Annual Federalist Society Faculty Conference, which is scheduled to take place on January 3 and 4 in New Orleans.

5. In the summer I was also scheduled to attend the XVIII International Hemingway Conference at the American University in Paris. Although I was unable to attend, in honor of this occasion I drafted a short essay titled “The Bayesian Man and the Sea.” My paper, which applies Bayesian probability to Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea, explores the logic of Santiago’s “decision calculus,” his fateful decision to set sail after going 84 days without catching a single fish, from a probabilistic perspective.

6. In honor of what would have been the philosopher Robert Nozick’s birthday 80th birthday on 16 Nov. 2018, I wrote up an extended review of Nozick’s classic book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU). In particular, beginning in November 2017 and extending into the spring and summer of 2018 (with various interruptions), I eventually ended up blogging about every single page of ASU. Type in the word “Nozick” in this blog’s search function if you wish to peruse any of my takes on Nozick’s masterpiece.

7. I also had the opportunity to talk about my 2013 paper “Gödel’s Loophole” with Professor Brian Frye on his scholarly podcast series “Ipse Dixit.” My Gödel paper, which has been downloaded over 5000 times (!), explores the possibility of a logical contradiction in the U.S. Constitution. It is available here (via SSRN), and you can listen to Prof Frye and I retell the story of Kurt Gödel’s discovery of this contradiction here.

Image credit: kinsta.com

Check out these beautiful mathematical pudding bowls. Each bowl contains the proof of a theorem, such as Gauss’s proof by induction. The proof is in the pudding bowls! (You can order a set of four bowls here. Hat tip: Cliff Pickover.)

Source: http://www.presentindicative.com

That is the subject of this beautiful paper by Kevin Toh, a philosopher of law at University College London. (The full title of his scholarly paper is “Authenticity, Ontology, and Natural History: Some Reflections on Musical and Legal Interpretation.”) In addition, Michael B. Coenen, a law professor at LSU in Baton Rouge, has written an excellent review of Professor Toh’s work. As Professor Coenen correctly notes, Toh is not the first to explore the relation between musical and legal interpretation; past and present preeminent legal scholars such as Jerome Frank (“Words and music: some remarks on statutory interpretation“), Richard Posner (“Bork and Beethoven“), and Jack Balkin (“Verdi’s High C“), among many others, have commented on the connection between music and law. But Toh’s extensive research draws from a wide variety of scholars, including literary theorists, philosophers of art, social psychologists, evolutionary biologists, as well as legal theorists. Below the fold is an extended excerpt from Prof Coenen’s masterful review: Continue reading →

Check out this incredible and creative collection of some of my favorite college graduation caps from this fall’s commencement ceremonies at the University of Central Florida. (All photos by Carly McCarthy, via UCF Today.) #ChargeOn

Cass Sunstein’s book “The Cost-Benefit Revolution” contains an excellent overview of cost-benefit analysis, so it is a must-read for law students and legal scholars, especially those of us who are interested in the perils and promise of the regulatory state, but without a general theory of harm–i.e. a theory that can tell us which harms should matter in the domains of law and ethics–Professor Sunstein’s cost-benefit approach to regulation is intellectually incoherent.

Link to my Twitter thread here.

About five years ago, we blogged about Mike Gatto, a California State Assemblyman who had set up the world’s first “Wiki-bill” in order to enable private individuals to help draft an actual law. It turns out that California is not the leader is in this field: Taiwan is! The Republic of China on Taiwan, the official name of the Island of Taiwan, has been experimenting with multiple forms of “digital democracy” since 2016. (The Taiwanese government even has a cabinet-level “digital minister”: Audrey Tang, pictured below.) According to this fascinating and detailed report by Chris Horton, a journalist based in the city of Taipei, Taiwan has used two online discussion platforms to crowdsource some of its laws–one is called Pol.is; the other is vTaiwan. Mr Horton’s report, which was published in The MIT Technology Review on 21 August 2018, explains how these two platforms work, and he also assesses their strengths and weaknesses. In brief, these platforms have generated novel solutions to some intractable problems, such as how to regulate Uber and online alcohol sales, but the recommendations generated by these platforms are not binding on the government. (But is the non-binding nature of these platforms a feature or a bug?)