prior probability

Our friend and colleague Frank Valdes (University of Miami) also attended the first annual Margaret Montoya Legal Scholarship Retreat. He shared his thoughts on the craft of scholarly writing during the retreat. Here are a few things that we learned from Professor Valdes:

1. There are puzzles, and then are Puzzles. Most scholarship is problem-solving. Some problems consist of puzzles (small p), problems that we have already solved in our minds. Our solution might be a tentative one, or it might be fully-developed. In either case, the purpose of our scholarly writing is to share our pre-arranged solutions with our readers. Other problems, by contrast, consist of Puzzles (capital P), problems we have no idea how to solve ahead of time. In these cases, writing is a form of discovery.
2. Cultivate your scholarly garden every single day. There is no algorithm for deciding what problems or puzzles/Puzzles are worth working on, but you must work on your problems every single day. This work might consist of studying the existing literature on one of your problems. Or it might consist of writing a paragraph or an entire page about some aspect of one of your problems. Or it might consist of editing a passage or page you have already written. Whatever the case, there are no short cuts. One must allocate sufficient time each day to one’s scholarly projects and problems. (This will be the time when you close your door, shut off your email, and just work.)
3. It doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be done. When do you know a particular project of yours is done? Ideally, it’s when you feel you have said something original or novel about the problem you are working on …

<<Under normal conditions the [legal scholar] is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those [that] he believes can be both stated and solved with the existing [legal] tradition.>>

We will continue blogging about the Margaret Montoya Legal Scholarship Retreat in the next few days.

As we mentioned in our previous post a few days ago, we have been attending the first annual Margaret Montoya Legal Scholarship Retreat at “Campo Sano” in a rural part of Volusia County, Florida. The WiFi connection was pretty bad out there, so we decided to disconnect from the Internet during our visit to Campo Sano. In this post, we will share three new things/insights that we learned from Professor Margaret Montoya during the retreat:

1. Lawyers, judges, and law professors are storytellers, so what stories do you want to tell? When a lawyer argues a case, or when a judge decides a case, or when a law professor writes a scholarly paper, they all usually begin by telling a story, such as the facts of the case under discussion. There are many types of stories and many ways of telling the same story. Good legal scholars are not only good storytellers; they are also able to find deeper meaning and connections between law and these stories.
2. Always ask yourself ahead of time, Who are you writing for? If you are a pre-tenure law professor, one of your audiences is going to be your tenure committee! How much this brute fact constrains the type of scholarship you want to engage in or the types of stories you want to tell may vary from university to university, but it’s always a good idea to consider ahead of time the scholarly reputation you want to develop.
3. Who did you leave out of your footnotes or end notes? In legal scholarship, who you don’t cite says as much about your scholarship as who is cited in your work. Whatever the specific legal field you are writing in, it is essential to acknowledge those who came before you …

Credit: Jane Hope

We are attending the first annual Margaret Montoya Legal Scholarship Retreat at “Campo Sano” (see image below) in Volusia County, close to Deland, Florida. More details to follow …

Like our fellow literary blogger Luanne Castle, we love blog titles with the word “May” in them. (Check out Ms Castle beautiful blog here.) So, here is Part 2 of our reading list for the rest of the month of May (and for June):

1. The book “Inadequate Equilibria” by Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of our favorite contemporary intellectuals. (Indeed, one of our previous papers, Visualizing Probabilistic Proof, was inspired in large part by Yudkowsky’s Bayesian approach to evidence.)
2. “Emotional Sentiments” by Emma Rothschild. This book reinterprets the ideas of Adam Smith and the Marquis de Condorcet (two of our favorite figures from the Enlightenment era), so it is a must-read for us.
3. John Earman’s powerful defense and critique of Bayesian methods in “Bayes or Bust?“. In the introduction to his classic book, he writes: “I confess that I am a Bayesian–at least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. *** On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, however, I have my doubts not only about the imperialistic ambitions of Bayesianism but also about its viability as a basis for … scientific inference. (On Sundays I try not to think about the matter.)” How could we not read this tome?

 

Moritz Stefaner is an artist specializing in data visualizations. Here is a description of one of his data art projects (see also the video summary below): “Today, we collectively and continuously document our city experience on social media platforms, shaping a virtual city image. Multiplicity reveals a novel view of this photographic landscape of attention and interests. How does Paris look as seen through the lens of thousands of photographers? What are the hotspots of attraction, what are the neglected corners? What are recurring poses and tropes? And how well do the published pictures reflect your personal view of the city?” Check out Mr Stefaner’s “Truth & Beauty Operations” website here.

We need to update our priors again! We have been reading Victor Goldberg’s 2006 book “Framing Contract Law” and have already posted some positive reviews of various chapters of his book. (See here, for example.) One of the major themes in the book is Professor Goldberg’s disdain (if not utter contempt) for “the good faith standard” in contract cases. To summarize Professor Goldberg’s position, courts do not apply the good faith standard evenly, for “good faith” is too vague a rule to police contract disputes. Initially, we agreed with Professor Goldberg’s devastating critique of the good faith standard, but the more we think about his critique, the more we realize that it is Goldberg who is wrong, not the judges! It turns out many contract disputes involve some form of “post-contractual opportunism.” (Indeed, there is an extensive academic literature about this problem. See image below for an example.) So, as good Bayesians, we are updating our position on the good faith standard and our review of Goldberg’s book. To the extent that opportunism is a genuine problem in many contractual relationships (and the reported cases confirm this observation), the good faith standard (though vague) is probably a good second-best judicial solution in response to the problem of post-contractual opportunism.

Credit: Carmella Merritt