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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In theory, smart contracts do not depend on the blockchain. In practice, however, most applications do connect the two. Here I investigate the strength of the link by analyzing Github repositories. I used a Python script to go through all the repositories that fit the search query “smart contracts.” The (very raw) code is appended…
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This is the previous draft of our forthcoming paper, Yonathan A. Arbel & Murat Mungan, Defamation Law with Bayesian Audiences, Forthcoming Journal of Legal Studies. The draft is titled “Regulating Information with Bayesian Audiences“
What is going on with L&E? There are many trends in the field, most clearly the the inexorable and partly excessive rush to empirical work. In this spirit, I thought we might be able to learn something from a more quantitative approach. To that end, I scrapped the website of the American Law & Economics…
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Lay people like to think that contracts have to be in writing. This is only true in specific situations and even then it’s not entirely correct. A set of rules known collectively as the Statute of Frauds makes it necessary to have some things in writing if you want to enforce the contract. This requirement…
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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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