prior probability

In addition to my regular teaching duties, this past year I worked on several different projects and attended a number of conferences. Here, I will review my scholarly activities during the first half of 2023:

1. TRUTH MARKETS PAPER: In January of 2023, I submitted my paper on “Truth Markets” to The Journal of Free Speech Law. Outcome: rejection due to two negative (for the most part) but extremely useful referee reports. (I would later re-write and improve the paper during the second half of 2023.)
2. ADVENTURES IN A.I.: Also in January, I finally began playing around with ChatGPT; among other things, I fed some of the research questions that I had worked on in past papers into the chatbot and then shared the results of my AI adventures on this blog. (See here, for example.)
3. REVIEW OF RULE OF LAW: I began writing up an in-depth, chapter-by-chapter review of the book Rule of Law by Tom Bingham, and I posted each installment of my multi-part review to this blog. (Here, by way of example, is my review of Chapter 3.)
4. RICHARD POSNER’S LEGACY: I also began writing up a series of blog posts in honor of my intellectual mentor and hero Richard Posner, starting with this one.
5. CONFERENCES: Next, I attended two cool conferences during the month of March: one on March 10, 2023 on the topic of “Advanced Air Mobility” at my home institution, the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, where I discussed the pros and cons of regulating the new “flying car” industry; the other on March 17-18, 2023 on new developments in the law of contracts (the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Contracts or KCON XVI) at Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas, where I presented my work-in-progress on “belief contracts”. (Here is a selfie I took of my panel at KCON.)
6. ADAM SMITH REVIEW. In April my review of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life by Ryan Patrick Hanley was published in Volume 13 of The Adam Smith Review. (See here.)
7. ALMA MATER: Also in April, my wife and I visited my college alma mater, the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I conducted research on one aspect of Adam Smith’s life — his studies at Oxford in the 1740s — and wrote up the first draft of my paper “Adam Smith, David Hume, and the Balliol College Conspiracy“, which is now under review at the Journal of the History of Economic Ideas.
8. FIRST DRAFT OF OUTER SPACE AUCTIONS: In May of 2023, I finally got around to writing my “shitty first draft” of a formal paper I had been actively researching since December of 2021. (In fact, I had already done so much research on this particular topic that the paper practically wrote itself!)
9. COASE’S PARABLE: Also in May (25 May, to be precise), my law review article “Coase’s Parable” was published in the Mercer Law Review. (This is another paper that practically wrote itself back in the summer of 2022, for I have been fascinated with the Coase Theorem since my first year of law school, when my torts professor Guido Calabresi introduced me to Ronald Coase’s classic paper “The Problem of Social Cost” in the fall of 1990.)
10. ADAM SMITH 300: In June of 2023, my family and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean to celebrate the tercentenary of Adam Smith’s birth in Scotland. In addition to attending a series of public lectures at the University of Glasgow and presenting my work on Adam Smith’s friendship with Horace Walpole, I also got to meet such luminaries as Sir Angus Deaton, Ryan Patrick Hanley, Dierdre McCloskey, and Craig Smith (no relation); visited David Hume and Adam Smith’s graves in Edinburgh; and got to take a private tour of Panmure House, where Adam Smith lived during the last 12 years of his life — highlights that I shall never forget!

Note: I will write up the second half of my year in review in the next day or two.

Alternate title: The Philosophy of Jaywalking

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a bunch of funny TikTok videos featuring California lawyer Michael J. Mandell a/k/a “Law by Mike“, including the one below on jaywalking, i.e. crossing a street outside a designated crosswalk.

For my part, I was thinking of writing up a formal academic paper on this topic (tentatively titled “The Philosophy of Jaywalking”) in which I use ChatGPT to imagine what the great thinkers of Western civilization — everyone from Aristotle and Aquinas to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein — would have to say about the law and ethics of jaywalking. Alas, a sizable scholarly literature already exists on this subject: input “jaywalking” into Google Scholar, for example, and you will get 12,300 results!

Between these two extremes — dense scholarly articles with footnotes on the one side and fun 30-second TikTok music videos on the other — you will find this moralistic critique of jaywalking laws by Daniel Herriges titled “‘Jaywalking’ Shouldn’t Even Be a Thing” (2020) as well as this maddening ProPublica report by Topher Sanders & Benjamin Conarck titled “Florida Police Issue Hundreds of Bad Pedestrian Tickets Every Year Because They Don’t Seem to Know the Law” (2017). The question these authors should be asking, however, is not whether jaywalking is ethical or should be illegal; the better question instead is: What is the optimal level of jaywalking?

Check out this recent report by Morgan Cloud with the provocative title “Trump Could Legally Use the U.S. Military as Domestic Law Enforcers” (2 December 2023). As it happens, this possibility is not just liberal media hype. The incumbent president (Joe Biden) not only appears to be senile for all intents and purposes; his main rival, Donald J. Trump, is still the front-runner in next year’s presidential election. More importantly, as I explain in-depth in my 2019 University of Arkansas law review article “Domestic Constitutional Violence” (see here or here), there is a 200-year body of law, now codified in volume 10 of the U.S. Code (§§ 251–255), authorizing the president to unilaterally use military force within the United States to deal with sundry domestic dangers. Maybe the Congress should revisit these perilous laws … before it’s late!

As you may have heard by now, the top four teams to make the College Football Playoff this season are Michigan (the winner of the “Big 10” Conference), Washington (the “Pac 12” champ), Texas (“Big 12”), and Alabama (“SEC”). Two of those teams went undefeated (Michigan and Washington), but Texas and Alabama were both one-loss teams. Why did Texas and Alabama both get invited to participate in the playoff ahead of Florida State, the only other major undefeated team in college football? Alas, that is the wrong question. What we should be asking instead is: How was FSU excluded?

Here’s what sealed FSU’s fate: the voting rules used by the selection committee. Recall from my description of Step #2 in my previous post how each committee member first selects the top six teams (in no particular order), and further recall from my description of Step #3 how committee members then rank those six teams from one to six. Now, here is the key: only the top three (i.e. the three teams with the most votes) get seeded. In other words, even if Florida State is considered a top six team (which the Seminoles arguably are, since they went undefeated this season), FSU would be one of six teams competing for just three (not four) playoff spots during these initial rounds of the selection process.

Alas, since Florida State failed to win enough votes to make the top three (a reasonable outcome given the rather lackluster performance of FSU’s offense of late), the Seminoles would now be competing with five other teams for the one remaining playoff spot during the next round of voting! Although the Seminoles went undefeated, does anyone really believe that FSU could beat Ohio State or even Oregon in a head-to-head match-up, let alone Alabama or Georgia, without star quarterback Jordan Travis or back-up QB Tate Rodemaker, both of whom are injured? That’s what I thought!

#1        MICHIGAN (13-0)

#2        WASHINGTON (13-0)

#3        TEXAS (12-1)

———————————————–

#4        ALABAMA (12-1)

#5        FLORIDA STATE (13-0)

#6        GEORGIA (12-1)

———————————————–

#7        OHIO STATE (11-1)

#8        OREGON (11-2)

#9        MISSOURI (10-2)

Stefano Tirone a/k/a S-Tone Inc. is an Italian jazz musician; his music below was inspired by the beautiful bossa nova rhythms of Brasil.

Although a strong case can be made that Florida State University should be in this year’s College Football Playoff (the Seminoles not only went undefeated this season; they arguably have the best defense of all the top teams), they were excluded by the playoff selection committee. What most, if not all, sports commentators and FSU fans have failed to mention, however, is that this egregious injustice is not just the inevitable by-product of scarcity — the fact that there are many more deserving teams than the precious few four available playoff spots. Instead, this shocking failure might have also resulted from the quirky voting rules used by the committee! In summary (see also here), the committee goes through the following five steps to produce their playoff rankings:

Step #1: Each committee member (there are 13 members in all) individually and subjectively selects 30 teams that they think are the best in the country. (Also, if three or more committee members pick a team, that team stays under consideration.)

Step #2: Each committee member then selects (again, individually and subjectively) who he or she thinks the best six teams are, in no particular order. The six teams that get the most overall votes in this round make up the pool for the next step.

Step #3: Next, each member ranks those top six teams in the pool (i.e. the six teams that got the most votes in the previous step) from one to six, with one being the best, and based on those rankings, teams obtain points as follows: teams ranked No. 1 will get one point; teams ranked No. 2 will get two points; and so on. The three teams that get the fewest points win the top three seeds (spots 1, 2, and 3).

Step #4: Each committee member then selects another set of six teams (again, in no particular order), and the three teams that get the most votes in this round will be added to the next set of three top seeds (spots 4, 5, and 6).

Last step: Steps three and four are repeated until all top-25 teams have been seeded.

Note: Tomorrow I will explain how these voting rules ended up hurting FSU’s chances for a playoff spot.

Hafiz (b. 1325, d. 1390) was a prodigious Persian poet who is best known for his magnum opus The Divan of Hafiz (دیوان حافظ), a posthumous compilation of his surviving poems. His stunning tomb, which I hope to visit one day, is located in Shiraz (شیراز), a city in south-central Iran known for its literary history and many gardens; hat tip: mathematician Cliff Pickover (@pickover).

“Rule of law” means that no one is above the law, including the public officials whose duty it is to make, enforce, and interpret ours laws and regulations. (See here or here, for example.) In other words, the same leaders who gave us the TSA should be required to go through TSA lines at the airport like the rest of us, right? Alas, check out this 2010 report from CBS News: “While the rest of the country enters a ‘Constitutional Twilight Zone’ every time they step into an airport, many top politicians and government officials have their rights to privacy fully protected when they fly, reports the Associated Press. Cabinet secretaries, top congressional leaders, and an exclusive group of senior U.S. officials are exempt from … airport screening procedures ….”

Via Nanette South Clark (Engineering Comic): “I remember what my biggest dream was, so I decided to make a comic about it. I had many 4am homework conversations at Denny’s with my fellow engineering students where we talked about switching majors so we could get a little shut-eye. I was particularly jealous of the geologists because they always looked so happy.”