Category: Jurisprudence
FREE Snarks and Boojums
One of the perqs (?) of writing for traditional, paper, law journals is the author’s offprint. One of the problems of writing for those journals is what to do with most of those offprints if one wants to keep one’s friends who aren’t compelled to accept one. They’re (the offprints, not the friends) aren’t as convenient as the old-style paper matchbooks for levelling off-kilter restaurant tables and the like.
Gone Boojum Hunting and other fancies and follies
I expect to be mostly absent until September.
“No such thing as probability” in the Law? – this does not compute
That’s not a quote from reasons for judgment (yet).
Across the North Atlantic, two professors of mathematics who ought to have crossed a few quadrangles – no doubt somebody was about – and asked for clarification have shown that some mathematicians know as little about law as some lawyers (academic or in practice) know about math.
See “”No such thing as probability” in the Law?” here and here.
I have it on good authority that there are well-regarded law faculties at the schools with which both professors are associated.
Bayes Theorem, Revisited
It won’t surprise some of you that I have an interest in evidence theory. I wrote, recently, on Slaw, about the use of Bayes Theorem in civil litigation in Canada. You will find that posting, as well as other discussions of Bayes Theorem on Slaw at this link.
I just learned of – I stumbled across it looking for something else – a recent doctoral theses on the use of Bayes Theorem in litigation. (The Americans fought this battle more than a decade ago: see the paper here.) We’re slow in Canada. It must be the weather. It can’t be that Canada is a “slow zone” as in, for example, Vernor Vinge’s “A Fire Upon The Deep“.
In any event, it’s a Canadian thesis, to boot.
Just rattle your jewellery
Readers of this blog who feel compelled to recite hosannas about the state of the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudence dealing with causation in negligence – both factual causation and normative causation (i.e., legal causation without factual causation: think “material contribution”) and the need to separate the issue of causation from the issue of compensable damage – would do well to read, and consider, a very recent article by one of the deans of the subject in the Commonwealth: Jane Stapleton, “Unnecessary Causes”, 2013 128 Law Quarterly Review 39. The article is succinct enough (26 pages). It has subheadings, too. While the piece is notionally about United Kingdom law, it is generally applicable to common law Canada and has a section on Clements. The article is available online if one has access to Westlaw.
The 4th Monkey Still in Abstenia 