prior probability

As I mentioned in a previous post, this semester my business law students are playing a role immersion game based on a hacking incident that occurred at Harvard in the fall of 2003, when Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg created a clandestine website called Facemash that allowed users to rank the hotness of co-eds at Harvard. In our first class, students were randomly assigned into roles (e.g., presiding officers, campus and town media outlets, and anti-Facemash, pro-Facemash, and wild card groups), and each group was given a role sheet outlining that group’s objectives, along with some recommend reading. Then in our second class, my students re-enacted an emergency meeting of the Harvard Undergrad Council and debated whether Facemash was a harmless prank or whether Zuckerberg broke any laws (circa 2003) or moral duties when he built Facemash. (In real life, Zuckerberg was “adboarded” by Harvard and either admonished or put on probation, but lucky for him, he was not sued or criminally prosecuted for his role in the Facemash hacking incident.)

In our next class, my students will re-enact a faculty tea at Harvard Law School and will debate some procedural aspects of the disciplinary process at Harvard. Specifically, my students will play Harvard law professors (each student group was already assigned a “faculty advisor” from the law school), and they will debate whether the ad board process (circa 2003) is fair or not, especially in cases involving allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault. (Because Facemash allowed users to rank women based on their appearance, one could argue that the Facemash prank contributed, even in a small way, to a hostile environment on campus.) Among other things, the law professors will debate the following due process issues:

1. What types of cases should the Ad Board hear? Should allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment be left to the courts?
2. Are the procedures of the Ad Board fair and consistent with due process? If not, what due process rights should students have when they are accused of misconduct? In particular, what burden of proof should the Ad Board use in cases involving student misconduct?
3. Should Harvard University prepare an anti-sexual harassment policy, and if so, how narrowly or broadly should “sexual harassment” be defined?

Stay tuned. I will say more about each one of these three issues in my next three blog posts. (For a summary of due process rights, see below the fold.) Continue reading →

See image below. A box with an X indicates an occupied seat, while empty boxes indicate empty seats. When there are more spaces (chairs) than audience members, why do law professors prefer sitting at both ends of a room rather than the middle of the room?

An indenture is an early form of contract, commonly used during the Middle Ages in England. Below is an original document dated 5 November 1408 (!), from Professor Tina L. Stark’s collection of old English indentures. (Prof. Stark presented her beautiful collection of antique indentures, bonds, deeds, and leases during the 13th annual International Conference on Contracts (KCON XIII) in Orlando, Florida.)

We will be attending the 13th annual International Conference on Contracts (KCON XIII) in Orlando, Florida this weekend (the conference program is available here), where we will moderate a panel on contract theory and present a Bayesian analysis of the rule in Hadley v. Baxendale, so we will take a short break from blogging until Monday. Hasta pronto!

See you there!

Via Twitter (@paraschopra), check out this excellent explanation of prediction markets (PMs) by our new friend Paras Chopra. This thread consists of 27 tweets in all; for your reference, below is a screenshot of tweets nine and eight:

Credit: Paras Chopra

One of our favorite textbooks is Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte, published in 2004 by McGraw-Hill Education. If Dr Whyte were to ever publish a second edition, perhaps he could include the following tweet in the “felony section” of his book as well as our “reply tweet” below:

People, cars are more dangerous than guns!

Via the work of Jesse Schell, we recently discovered this fascinating 23-page essay by Stephen Sniderman titled “Unwritten Rules.” Here is an excerpt (edited by us for brevity):

Suppose I challenge you to a game of tic-tac-toe. Could anything be more straightforward? But just to be sure, we review the rules. We’ll play on a 3×3 grid, we’ll alternate turns, we’ll play only in empty squares, I’ll play X‘s, you play O‘s, I’ll play first, and the first player to get three of his/her symbol in a row, column, or diagonal wins the game. Aren’t these all the rules of tic-tac-toe? Well, for one thing, nothing has been said about time. Is there a time limit between moves? ***

Suppose we add the following rule:  Players will make their moves within a reasonable amount of time. Have we solved anything? What is a “reasonable” amount of time? One minute? Five? 30? A million? And who determines what is reasonable—the player whose turn it is or the other player? Such a rule is actually self-defeating because it calls attention to the fact that we cannot spell out what “reasonable” means.

So why not just specify a time limit for each move? Because we would just create even more perplexing problems for ourselves. For one thing, we would have to indicate when a player’s time is running and when it is not. If one player had to answer the phone, for example, would we count that time or wouldn’t we? To state the rule fully, we would have to list every life situation that could possibly interrupt a player’s turn and state whether it should count against that player’s time limit. Obviously, we could never complete such a list.

Image Credit: Deposit Photos