F*ck the police?

Posted on July 26, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

What’s the probability that you won’t get a parking ticket or moving violation this year? This value might just depend on the population of your city, the number of police where you live and work, and the traffic-ticket quota assigned to each officer …

While you try to figure out this value, check out this expose written up by Tracy Oppenheimer for reason.com … The title of her revealing report is “Cop Fired for Speaking Out Against Ticket and Arrest Quotas.”

It is well-known that police officers typically lie on the witness stand in criminal trials (see, e.g., this recent report in the New York Times on why police lie under oath), so why do the police also have such tyrannical authority to impose fines on citizens for mere regulatory offenses?

This is why prior probability thinks that most police officers are just glorified “tax collectors” …

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A-Rod versus the Yankees

Posted on July 25, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Looks like the Yankees’ management made a bad bet when the re-signed star third-baseman Alex Rodriguez several years ago … There are reports that A-Rod wants to return to the Yankees’ lineup this Friday (26 July) but that Brian Cashman, the team’s General Manager, wants to keep his player off the team roster. Some sports pundits have even suggested that Cashman wants to void A-Rod’s multi-million dollar contract with the Yankees. (*) Given that Cashman is the General Manager, while A-Rod is just an unpopular and overpaid player, what is the probability that A-Rod will actually appear in the Yankees’ lineup this Friday?

(*) This possibility, in turn, raises an interesting legal question: what legal remedy would A-Rod be entitled to under New York law for breach of contract?

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Nate Silver’s new gig

Posted on July 24, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Farewell New York Times … Nate Silver is joining ESPN.

Here is Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s “public editor” (whatever that means), contrasting Silver’s approach to politics to that of regular or mainstream journalism:

“His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or ‘punditry,’ as he put it, famously describing it as ‘fundamentally useless.'”

The same could be said for prior probability‘s probabilistic approach to law, life, and love, so we are rooting for Nate Silver, wherever he goes.

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Is the “rule of law” dead?

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

Secret courts … Secret “kill lists” … Secret drone missions … An intellectually-honest jurist has to ask, what has happened to the rule of law?

prior probability also asks, what is the probability that these secret (and illegal?) tactics will reduce (or increase) the threat of terrorism by some well-defined time period (e.g., the end of this year)?

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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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