Law Roundtable

A recent Washington Post news story describing a speech by Christina Romer, the outgoing chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, provides a nice example of how to implicitly assume your conclusion. The author writes:

At week's end, Romer will leave the council chairmanship after what ...

I recently came across a National Geographic article describing the results from DNA analysis of a number of mummies, including King Tut. It was an interesting article, but there was one thing in it that annoyed me. In describing their results, the author said that the DNA analysis ...

There has been a lot of coverage of the fact that, according to at least one report, about 18% of the population believe that Obama is Muslim. I know of no reason to believe they are correct. On the other hand, I find the confident assertion that ...

Or do they?

It would be a mistake for schools, especially elite schools, to allocate places entirely on the basis of price, for at least three reasons.

1. Part of what schools are selling is a credential, and part of that credential comes from having been ...

I've been arguing about the meaning of Adam Smith's invisible hand on one blog and about whether it is obviously wrong for people such as orthodox Jews or Amish to bring criminal charges to their own authorities before reporting them to the police on another. Some readers may ...

" This is probably because they interact socially with a far less age-segregated set of people (our public school system is really quite unique, and profoundly unnatural that way, it is as if someone read Lord of the Flies and decided it was prescriptive rather than ...

The recent egg recalls have raised the issue of whether the FDA should require farmers to vaccinate their hens against salmonella, something it has so far declined to do. Thus the NYT writes:

Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were ...

Someone commenting on my previous post mentioned the Gricean maxim of relevance. Checking the Wikipedia article on the Gricean maxims, I find the interesting comment that:

“Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I ...

In online discussions, I have come across an interesting disagreement over the meaning of a common word. To my ear, "most" means a large majority. To at least some others, it means any majority. Checking online dictionary definitions, I was surprised to find that many supported their meaning for the ...

Earlier this year I gave a talk in Brazil based on an old book chapter. The central argument is that the producers of law in a system such as that I described in The Machinery of Freedom, unlike the producers of law in a conventional political system, have ...