Should Spanish be an official language of the US?

Posted on July 23, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

What is the probability that Spanish will be recognized as one of the official languages of the US, along with English, by the end of this decade?  If you think it is below 0.01, think again … Deadline Hollywood, for example, is reporting that the Spanish-language TV network UNIVISION “will finish the July 2013 sweep ratings derby at No. 1 in both the 18-49 and 18-34 demographic groups, beating all of the English-language broadcast networks, a sweep first for the Spanish-language network.”  Law is usually slow to catch up with reality, the question is “how slow?” when it comes to language rights …

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Royal probabilities

Posted on July 22, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Before the birth of a baby boy today to Kate & William, the probability that the baby would in fact be a boy was 1/2, but what is the probability that the boy’s grandfather, Prince Charles, will ever ascend the throne? That is, what is the probability that Queen Elizabeth II will outlive Prince Charles or that Charles will voluntarily abdicate the throne in favor of his son William? According to some scholars, like Robin Hanson, one way to find out is to create a prediction market and let people place bets on these outcomes. But do prediction markets really work? Why don’t we start one to find out?

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Bets & taxes

Posted on July 22, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

“Are gamblers required to pay taxes on every winning bet – for example, every winning pull of the slot machine? Or can they report the overall income – gains minus losses – from a session of gambling?”

This is the question posed in the recent case of Park v. Commissioner, decided on 9 July 2013. Judge Brett Kavenaugh, writing for the D.C. Court of Appeals, opens his decision thus:

“After a night of gambling, it’s no fun to walk out of the casino a loser. But it’s even worse when the IRS, on your way out, tries to tax you on each individual bet that you happened to win over the course of your losing night. Enter Sang Park, a South Korean businessman who gambled away thousands of dollars at slot machines on casino outings during his trips to the United States – only then to have the IRS seek more in taxes.”

Hat tip to Mike Doyle.

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The law of fantasy sports

Posted on July 20, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

prior probability‘s former colleague Marc Edelman, one of the top scholars in the emerging area of sports law, has written a short treatise on fantasy sports and the law. (Check out his twitter too.) Here is part of his abstract: “America is in the midst of a ‘fantasy sports revolution’ that is changing the way sports fans interact with one another. With more than 30 million Americans playing fantasy sports, today’s sports fans spend as much time predicting the performance of professional athletes as Wall Street investors spend predicting stocks and bonds. This article explains how U.S. law regulates the emerging fantasy sports industry …” In other words, people love to bet on sports, and the law has something to say about this activity. Shouldn’t the law legalize all bets?

Also, check out Professor Edelman’s cool website sportsjudge.com

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Can an amendment to the Constitution be unconstitutional?

Posted on July 19, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

prior probability would rephrase the above question this way: what is the probability that a court will declare an amendment to the constitution unconstitutional?

We often assume that all the provisions within a country’s constitution are internally consistent. But is internal self-consistency always the case? What about conflicts between international law, natural law norms, and a country’s domestic constitutional order? Does international law or natural law trump constitutional law?

Yaniv Roznai, a PhD candidate in the Law Department at the London School of Economics, has just published a fascinating paper (“The Theory and Practice of ‘Supra-Constitutional’ Limits on Constitutional Amendments”) on these questions.  I saw Yaniv present a previous draft of this paper at the Third Annual Constitutional Law Colloquium at Loyola University (Chicago) last fall, and was very impressed with his thoughtfulness and erudition. If you care about the philosophy of constitutional law, or what I like to call “meta-jurisprudence,” I recommend his deep analysis of the different levels of “legal orders” and their relation to constitutional law.

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Tyler Cowen asks, “How big is your chance of dying in an ordinary day?”

Posted on July 18, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

See Tyler’s post here or read “The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers about Danger” to find out.

FYI, Tyler includes this quote from the book: “A Micromort can also be compared to a form of imaginary Russian roulette in which 20 coins are thrown in the air: if they all come down heads, the subject is executed.  That is about the same odds as the 1-in-a-million chance that we describe as the average everyday dose of acute fatal risk.”

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What do you think of the new Rolling Stone cover?

Posted on July 17, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Here is a more interesting question: is your reaction based on moral grounds, emotions, aesthetic considerations, or something else? In addition, we would ask, what is the probability that this provocative cover will increase (or decrease) the sales of Rolling Stone magazine?

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Landsburg’s “Bayesian Riddle”

Posted on July 17, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Economist Steven Landsburg recently posed the following Bayesian riddle here.

A murder has been committed. The suspects are:

  • Bob, a male smoker.
  • Carol, a female smoker.
  • Ted, another male smoker.
  • Alice, a female non-smoker.

You are quite sure that one (and only one) of these suspects is the culprit. Moreover, after carefully examining the evidence, you’ve concluded that the odds are 2-to-1 that the culprit is a smoker.

Now your crack investigative team, in which you have total confidence, reports that, on the basis of new evidence, they’ve determined that the culprit is definitely female.

Who’s the most likely culprit, and with what probability?

Here is his solution. 

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Time travel thought experiment

Posted on July 17, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

If you could go back in time and share one piece of scientific knowledge from today, what time period would you choose, what would you share, and how might that information change the course of history?

I am a big fan of Bayes’ Rule, so here is my response. 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Time_Travel_Method-2.svg

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What do juries maximize?

Posted on July 16, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

The great legal scholar Richard Posner once famously asked, “What do judges maximize?” Given all the publicity surrounding the “not guilty” verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, I would ask a different question, What do juries maximize? Jurors have not studied the law and are not compensated the full market value of their time, and yet, in most cases, they seem to get it right. Put another way, why don’t jurors behave like self-serving bureaucrats or politicians? Could it be that more altruistic and civic-minded persons self-select into juries? What do you think?

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