This post is a companion to my (draft) Essay: Slicing Defamation by Contract The first Truth Bounty, the Carbolic Smoke Ball advertisement The RNC Case Republican Nat. Comm. v. Taylor, 299 F.3d 887, 889 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (Credit: USA Today; special thanks to Culverhouse Law librarian, Blakeley L. Beals, who obtained a copy of the original….
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It is very common today for consumers to use peer-to-peer reputational information. Online reviews are the latest incarnation of the old social customs of gossip and word-of-mouth, and they generate considerable excitement among policymakers and scholars. There is a growing sense that, with the advent of the sharing economy and mega reputational platforms such as…
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Part of my recent work criticizes doctors and hospitals for taking advantage of patients, trying to circumvent liability for accidents by various means. This gets me, as expected, into a lot of arguments. Had my argument only been contested by doctors, that would have been understandable, but non-doctors make arguments that have very much the…
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Two new posts, one on Econlog and one on Facebook, made me reflect on poverty. The first is a post by (the incredible) Bryan Caplan, who talks about a research showing that people in richer neighborhood are not generally happier and sometimes less happy than people in less affluent neighborhoods.  The second was a long,…
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A friend ranted to me about the facts of a libel case (Israel). In this case, a Facebook discussion between a PUA and a feminist expectedly heated up. The feminist called the PUA a “low-life” and charitably added that she has no doubt that “throughout his life, he has committed rape.” Serious accusations, no doubt,…
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This Vox article has a few interesting tidbits, like the origin of the custom of the ‘toast’ and kethcup. But most interestingly it claims that people exhibit signs of a minor trauma when they write a one-star review on Yelp and the such: “Social psychologists have looked at cases of trauma and the language people use…
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This weird story has been receiving some attention on Facebook and elsewhere: Professor Edelman is a Harvard Business School professor who ordered Chinese food off the web menu of a local Chinese restaurant only to discover that he was overcharged for each of the four items by $1. Apparently, the restaurant updated their menu and,…
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One of the greatest sources of suspense, surprise, and mystery in DnD games comes from the sense that anything could happen.  For example, there is a convention that a roll of 20 could lead to extreme fortunate results (or unfortunate in the case of 1), which is a source of suspense, humor, and a lot of…
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In the US, there have been 728,833 chapter 7 bankruptcy filings (complete insolvency) and 333,626  filings in chapter 13 (repayment plan).  This averages at 1 bankruptcy per 301 people. In Israel, there are now reports of rising  bankruptcy filings (reported here in Hebrew). The numbers look, after the increase, small: 11,300 stay orders in 2013. This averages at 1…
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On most issues of law and morality, I am an instrumentalist, functionalist, and consequentialist: I think of laws as being either good or bad in relation to their outcomes rather than their meaning, adherence to moral principles, or consistency. But this view is not generally accepted, and many legal theorists adopt some mixed approach that…
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