Corrected (2/18): In case you’re wondering, via Adam J. Calhoun this is what two different English-language novels look like if you were to take out all the words and sentences and just leave the punctuation marks behind:
Reblog: “Punctuation in novels”
Antonin Scalia
We had the honor of meeting the gregarious Antonin Scalia on several occasions during his visit a few years ago to the Pontifical Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where we used to teach. At a faculty luncheon in his honor, one of my colleagues (Ruben Nigaglioni, a respected attorney and long-time torts professor) asked Justice Scalia what was the most difficult decision he had ever made as a sitting judge. I will never forget this moment. The room fell quiet as Scalia thought about this question. After a few moments of quiet reflection, Scalia finally answered Boyle v. United Technologies Corporation (a products liability case). He said that his heart told him to rule in favor of the plaintiff, a Marine helicopter pilot who died in a tragic accident caused by a product defect, but his legal reasoning led him to cast the deciding vote in favor of the defendants, the military contractors that had designed and built the defective helicopter. I will never forget this moment (and Scalia’s answer), for it illustrated the enormous chasm that exists between judges and law professors. Law professors get to argue about “hard cases” from the luxury of our Ivory Towers. Judges, however, are the ones who actually have to decide these cases.
Image Credit: Art Lien
Posted in Law
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Cause or effect?
Image Credit: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Posted in Culture, Logical Fallacies
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Final results of the 2015 New Zealand flag referendum
The New Zealand flag referendum was decided using an instant run-off voting procedure. Under this system of preference voting, the voters rank the choices in order of preferred alternatives. Notice how voting occurs over several stages or rounds and how the choice with the fewest number of votes is eliminated during each round. Here is a reddit thread on this particular vote.
Tree time …
We converted our traditional Christmas tree into an “NFL playoffs tree” after Three Kings’ Day (we completed this makeover while the family was sleeping). Now that the Super Bowl is done, my wife wants me to take down our tree. I, however, want to convert it into a St Valentine’s Tree. Who wins?
Save me!
A Bayesian Model of “Making a Murderer”
In our previous posts (here and here), we revisited two of our research papers–one on range voting; the other on the Turing Test–and created alternate legal universes in which jury trials were decided using a range voting procedure or some form of Alan Turing’s “imitation game.” In this post, we shall discuss our 2011 peer-reviewed paper “A Bayesian Model of the Litigation Game” published in the European Journal of Legal Studies. Instead of creating an alternate legal universe (like we did in our previous posts), our Bayesian litigation paper models the existing legal system as is, warts and all. Specifically, we developed a Bayesian model of criminal and civil litigation, a model that is relevant to the central question posed in “making a Murderer”: how confident are you in Steven Avery’s guilt? Our Bayesian model includes a scenario in which the outcome of a trial is purely random (like a coin toss) and in which the moving party is “risk-loving” (i.e. in which the prosecutor is only 60% confident the defendant is guilty). Unfortunately for Mr Avery, the surprising result about our Bayesian model is that even in this random, risk-loving scenario, the posterior probability that the defendant is, in fact, guilty is pretty high.
Painting by S. Uchii
Posted in Current Affairs, Justice, Law
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The Turing Test and “Making a Murderer”
In our previous blog post, we applied the concept of “range voting” to jury trials. Today, we will discuss our 2012 paper “The Turing Test and the Legal Process” (published in volume 21 of the journal of Information & Communication Technology Law) and apply the Turing Test idea to jury trials. The original Turing Test refers to a simple game proposed by the great computer scientist Alan Turing (see video below). In brief, the game, in its original conception, involves three players: a man (player A), a woman (player B), and an interrogator (player C), who may be of either gender. The interrogator is allowed to put questions in writing to players A and B, and based only on the written responses provided by A and B, the interrogator must guess their true genders, or in Turing’s own words: “the object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.” Notice, then, the object of player A, the man, in Turing’s game is to deceive or fool the interrogator about the truth of his gender (and about the truth of the other player’s gender as well). Now consider a jury trial, like Steven Avery’s murder case in “Making a Murderer.” One of the things we did not like about Mr Avery’s legal strategy was his decision not to testify at trial, a common strategy in most criminal cases. But what would happen if criminal defendants were required to play a Turing game? That is, what would happen if the Turing Test were applied to jury trials? In other words, imagine an alternate legal universe in which player A assumes the role of the moving party (i.e., the prosecutor); player B, the role of the defendant; and player C, the judge or jury. In this alternate legal universe, the interrogator would be allowed to put questions directly to the parties in order to more accurately guess whether player B has committed a crime or other wrongful act or not. Although such a game may sound strange when applied to a legal dispute, isn’t such a “Turingesque” procedure more likely to generate the truth rather than the current criminal justice system, which encourages defendants not to testify?
Posted in Current Affairs, Law, Probability
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Range Voting and “Making a Murderer”
Hey, what’s up? For our part, we’ve just finished watching season 1 of the amazing Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer, which shows beyond a reasonable doubt how one criminal suspect, Steven Avery, was framed (not once, but twice) by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department. Also, for what it’s worth, several of our recent research papers are very relevant to the issues raised in the series. In this blog post, we will discuss our 2015 paper “Why don’t juries try ‘range voting’” published in volume 51 of the Criminal Law Bulletin. Briefly, instead of requiring jurors to vote all-or-nothing, i.e. “guilty” or “not guilty,” why not replace this binary tradition with a more nuanced range voting procedure. Specifically, why not let jurors score or rate the prosecution’s case on a scale of 0 to 10. Under our range voting proposal, the highest possible score the prosecution could receive would be a perfect 120, while the lowest possible score would be 0, and the defendant would be found guilty only if the sum of the juror’s individual scores exceed a certain threshold, say 100.
Now, let’s apply our alternative range voting procedure to the Avery murder trial depicted in “Making a Murderer.” In the series finale, we learn that two of the jurors in the Avery case were undecided at the start of deliberations; three jurors were ready to convict, and the remaining seven initially had reasonable doubts. Accordingly, the two undecided jurors could have assigned a “5” to the prosecution’s case, the mid-point between 0 and 10. By contrast, each of the three pro-conviction jurors could have rated the prosecution’s case a 9 if they were 90% certain of the defendant’s guilt, an 8 if they were only 80% certain, and so on. Lastly, each one of the seven reasonable-doubt jurors could have scored the prosecution’s case a 1 if they were 10% certain of the defendant’s guilt, a 2 if they were only 20% certain, and so on. Once each juror assigns a score or rating to the prosecution’s case, they would then add up all the scores, and Avery would have been declared guilty only if the sum of all the juror’s scores exceeded the threshold value.
How confident are you in the prosecution’s case?
Posted in Current Affairs, Law, Voting
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prior probability 