The mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel reportedly discovered a deep logical contradiction in the US Constitution. What was it? In this paper, the author revisits the story of Gödel's discovery and identifies one particular “design defect” in the Constitution that qualifies as a...

In this paper, the author analyzes Friedman's dogmatic approach towards freedom (part 2), his misuse of historical examples (part 3), and his tautological definition of freedom (part 4). In fairness to Friedman, however, this paper concludes by explaining why any attempt to define freedom is...

Over a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes invited scholars to look at law through the lens of probability theory: ‘The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law'. But Holmes himself, and few others, have taken up this intriguing...

The English polymath Frank Ramsey was one of the first scholars to paint a subjective picture of probability, but how and when did he make this discovery? Among other things, Cheryl Misak's beautiful biography of Ramsey explores this remarkable terrain, which we review in part one of this paper....

This paper explores the law and economics of “literary fan art,” i.e. unauthorized derivative works by third parties that are based on someone else's literary work product. What is the legal status of such fan art? Because copyright laws extend to derivative works, the legal question boils...

Part I briefly considers the taxation of bitcoin transactions to give the reader some sense of the constitutional Pandora's box that was opened by South Dakota v. Wayfair. Part II then delves into one aspect of the Wayfair decision that has broad implications for the future. Specifically, when...

Should scientists, statisticians, and other researchers be held to the same legal standards as certified public accountants or other actors involved in business or commercial activity? What about research organizations that rely on fraudulent research methods or predatory publishers who publish...

In our previous work (Guerra-Pujol, 2011), we presented a general Bayesian model of the litigation process and concluded that "regardless of the operative rules of procedure and substantive legal doctrine, litigation outcomes [are] a highly reliable indicator of a defendant's [actual] guilt." By...

Ron Allen and Mike Pardo have criticized probabilistic theories of legal proof and have presented an alternative “relative plausibility” theory of legal proof. Alas, both Allen and Pardo's critique and their new approach are wrong. The remainder of this paper will describe their theory of...

In our previous paper "Gödel's Loophole," we retold the story of Kurt Gödel's discovery in late 1947 of a deep logical contradiction in the United States Constitution. At the time, however, and for many years thereafter, this purported discovery was discounted as nonsense or as highly...