The Supreme Court dealt with a relatively large number of defamation cases over the years. I was curious to see which media were most commonly involved. With the help of my trusted RA, Brandon Hobbs, we were able to create the above graph based on the analysis of 45 cases found on Westlaw. (Caveats apply:…
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Post quarantine it’s been harder to keep the same schedule, and ironically or not, going to school led to a serious slowdown in the kids’ academic development. Still, we keep on doing Anki (“The Honesty Game”) every day. Their decks include: (a) Multiplication table (1-12) (b) Division (1-12) (c) Powers and roots (simple ones: 2^2,…
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Hills v. Gateway 2000 105 F.3d 1147 (1997) generates a lot of controversies, which is appropriate since the decision is pretty much wrong. (No, battle of the forms does not require forms, a single form is enough). I want to offer a simple outline of the various logical possibilities, including my favorite one. We have…
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If there is one principle that’s key to understanding contract damages is that the legal system is terrified of someone getting more compensation than what they deserve. One mustn’t profit from a breach of K. Put the non-breaching party in the position they would’ve occupied but for the breach, but not a better one. What…
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Pink Slime BPI original complaint.
Lucy v. Zhemer is understandably one of the greatest cases in the 1L curriculum. The framing of this case is usually within the objective theory of assent, and it is used to show that even though we have some reason to think that Zhemer was only joking (which is what he whispered to his wife),…
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A companion post to the article, tentatively titled, A Status Theory of Defamation Law. Formal Model, Appendix Suggested listening
The following Tweet complains about a very common problem. An article looks suspicious, yet it attracts countless citations. It’s hard to believe, perhaps, but even retracted articles get cited, sometimes hundreds of times. The citing scientist might be at fault–not assessing the article clearly enough, not looking for reviews, etc.–but I believe the bigger problem…
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Continuing my last post, here are some updates (9.22) School resumed, online, which greatly limited our progress. In some ways, school is for the time being less education and more entertainment. We now have roughly 40 minutes per kid for education + 20 minutes to practice reading Hebrew in the afternoon. In the 40 minutes,…
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A collection of papers that I found to be literally thought-provoking: making you think new thoughts. To be sure: Making you think is decidedly not the same as an agreement with the substance, and sometimes the correlation goes the other way. But either way, here are papers (I thought were) worth reading. Joshua M. Silverstein,…
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