prior probability

This is what we were reading over the holidays:

1. Ernest Hemingway, A moveable feast.

We returned to Hemingway’s Paris memoir. (Overall, this was our third reading of Hemingway’s vignettes of his early years in Paris.) Two details struck us this time around: Hemingway’s risky decision to stop working as a journalist in order to devote himself to his real work, and how little writing he actually did in Paris, for he wrote and rewrote most of his first novel in Austria.

2. Roy Sorenson, Thought experiments.

A book-length response to Thomas Kuhn’s essay “A function for thought experiments.”

3. Daniel & Richard Susskind, Transforming the professions.

This father and son team explain how advanced machines like IBM Watson will soon eliminate lawyers, doctors, and accountants (and other professions too), and why this is a good thing!

4. William Pounstone, Labyrinths of reason.

We stumbled upon a copy of this book at a used bookstore in the Mission District in San Francisco (Poundstone is one of our favorite writers), and this particular book of his could be read together with Sorenson’s, as it covers many of the same thought experiments. (It turns out that many thought experiments are about paradoxes.)

5. James A. Harris, Hume: an intellectual autobiography.

We have been wanting to read this tome since Tyler Cowen recommended it to us last year, but we waited in vain for the paperback edition to be released. We just ordered a used edition and started reading it, so we will provide regular updates in future posts.

Update (2/1): We just completed our reading of Harris’s tome on Hume. We will be blogging about his extraordinary book soon.

Cat not included.

Update (1/22): Steve Kolowich speculates here on whether Mr Obama could get a teaching job at a top U.S. law school given his thin (and fraudulent, we would add; see below) publication record. (Hat tip: Paul Caron, via TaxProfBlog.)

Via the Volokh Conspiracy, our friend and colleague Will Baude brought to our attention this 56-page academic article in this month’s issue of the Harvard Law Review: “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform.” So, what’s so special about this scholarly article? Barack Obama is listed as its sole author! 

But, hey, did President Obama himself really have the time to write up all 56 single-spaced pages and research all 317 footnotes of his law review article? If not, do the editors of the Harvard Law Review have a legal or ethical duty to disclose all the names of the persons who helped Obama write and research his article?

As we mentioned in our previous post, we will be presenting our work in progress on “probabilistic interpretation” at this year’s Federalist Society Annual Faculty Conference. Since the conference is in San Francisco, our talk will make reference to the fictional Starfleet Command (from the Star Trek sci fi series): imagine going warp drive and beaming down to “Planet Newgarth” during the tumult over the Case of the Spelencean Explorers, a make-believe murder prosecution professor Lon Fuller wrote about in the late 1940s on Earth. It’s the year 4299 A.D., so why are there no “machine judges” on the Supreme Court of Newgarth? In our talk, we imagine just such a scenario and discuss how a machine might decide (not just predict the outcome of) a close case.

That is the title of our most recent work in progress; one of the research projects we were working on while we were on sabbatical. (Part 1 of the paper will be published in the University of LaVerne Law Review this spring and is available here.) Part 2 presents Lon Fuller’s “Case of the Speluncean Explorers,” one of the most famous thought experiments in legal studies. In our paper (part 2), we imagine an alternative system of voting by appellate judges, a bayesian or cardinal voting system in which judges assign a score to their preferred judicial outcome. Appellate courts generally use an ordinal system of voting (i.e. one judge, one vote) to decide cases. By contrast, we propose a simple cardinal voting system for deciding appellate cases, using Fuller’s hypothetical case to illustrate how our simple system of cardinal voting would work in practice.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons