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Tag Archives: Law
Is SeaWorld guilty of false imprisonment?
Right now a controversial piece of draft legislation, Assembly Bill 2140, is pending before the Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee of the California State Assembly. This bill would require SeaWorld San Diego to stop using killer whales in its iconic marine shows and to … Continue reading
Acts of love …
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush got it right … calling for compassion for illegal immigrants and recognizing that most undocumented workers come to the US to provide for their families: “Yes, they broke the law,” Mr Bush told a reporter, “but it’s not a … Continue reading
Shouldn’t Smith & Wesson and the maker of Ambien be legally liable for the recent Fort Hood massacre?
Many reports indicate that the gunman, Ivan Lopez, had been prescribed the drug Ambien when he killed four men (including himself) and injured 16 others on 3 April 2014 with his .45-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol. This senseless massacre of innocent people raises … Continue reading
Litigation and the game of poker
As we note in our 2012 working paper The Poker-Litigation Game, the process of legal litigation shares many important features in common with the game of poker: 1. Both poker and litigation are strategic games, that is, competitions in which the players/litigants must … Continue reading
Thoughts On Northwestern Football Unionization
Originally posted on Cheap Talk:
These are my thoughts and not those of Northwestern University, Northwestern Athletics, the Northwestern football team, nor of the Northwestern football players. As usual, the emergence of a unionization movement is the symptom of a…
The tragedy of the outer space commons?
Check out this fascinating paper Earth Orbit Debris: An Economic Model in which the problem of space debris is modeled as a negative externality. What is the optimal number of space satellites, and who decides? Do you believe there are already too many … Continue reading
Byzantium = Constantinople = Istanbul
Let’s say you want to rename a large metropolitan city with an ancient and long-established name. By way of example, let’s say you want to rename the historic city of “Constantinople” in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to “Istanbul”. How would you … Continue reading
Why do criminal defendants get to plead the Fifth?
Put differently, if you could turn back the clock or re-write the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, would you take out the right against self-incrimination? If you care about truth, or about the victims of crime, the answer has … Continue reading
Do women attorneys dress too sexy?
According to this recent report by Slate staff writer Amanda Hess, a lot of judges (most of whom are male, by the way) apparently seem to think so. But as Ms Hess notes in her report, the dress code for … Continue reading
The fate of Flight 370? An urgent call for single-event prediction markets …
A single-event prediction market might make it easier to determine more rigorously the probabilities of what really happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Presently, a wide variety of conjectures and conspiracy theories are swirling around (especially on CNN) about what might … Continue reading
prior probability 