prior probability

Let’s get real … The stars & bars are no more inclusive than ISIS’s black flag is.Credit for “Wonder Bree”: Rebecca Cohen (via tumblr).

Overall, how great is the Supreme Court in protecting our rights? On balance, does the Court create more rights than it taketh away? For our part, we concur with the excellent David Post (via The Volokh Conspiracy) that “a Supreme Court that has the power to strike down state laws prohibiting marriage between persons of the same sex is also (and necessarily) a Supreme Court that has the power to, say, strike down state laws allowing marriages between persons of the same sex …” In other words: judicial power is a double-edged sword. A court presumptuous enough to create new rights is also powerful enough to take away our rights. Continue reading →

We are not big fans of Alice Goffman’s best-selling book On the run, since we think most of the stories in her book are pure fiction at best. (We have even gone as far as to suggest that “Goffman is the new Margaret Mead,” for accepting uncritically everything she was told by her research subjects.) But did Alice Goffman commit a major crime while she was researching and writing the dissertation on which her book is based? Steven Lubet, a grumpy old law professor at Northwestern, thinks so. He has accused Professor Goffman of the inchoate crime of conspiracy to commit murder under Pennsylvania law. By her own admission, Goffman wanted revenge for the killing of one of her research subjects and close friends, a young man she identifies as “Chuck.” According to Professor Goffman, Chuck was shot in the head by a rival gang member. A few days after his funeral, Goffman states that “the hunt was on to find the man who had killed Chuck.” She describes the plot for revenge thus:  Continue reading →

British researchers Patrick Sharman and Alatair J. Wilson argue that racehorses are indeed getting faster. (Their research on racehorse speeds is available in this scientific paper, the source of the table appearing below. By the way, our mentor Jorge Cordova would have loved this paper!) On a related note, notice the pdf version of Sharman & Wilson’s racehorse paper is only four and one-half pages long, including footnotes. Law review articles, by contrast, tend to be getting longer and more tedious to read–with some notable exceptions. So, why can’t law review articles–whether they be doctrinal, empirical, or theoretical–be more concise and to the point? (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen.)