Category: Scholarship
Gone Boojum Hunting and other fancies and follies
I expect to be mostly absent until September.
Swans & Induction
We won’t mention the silly walk.
“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.
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.
In search of sky hooks & left-handed monkey wrenches
and other tools of note.
Once upon a time, a judge of the US Supreme Court, asked to define the meaning of obscenity for criminal purposes, wrote
It is possible to read the Court’s opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476, in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which, in those cases, was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court’s decisions since Roth and Alberts, that, under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Potter Stewart J (concurring), Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964) [internal footnotes omitted].
The 4th Monkey Still in Abstenia 