… Lawrence Lessig is kind of a doofus
Stupid legal arguments: a moral hazard?
I’ve published two theorems; one was true and one turned out to be false. We would say the total number of theorems I’ve proved is 1, not 2 or 0. The false theorem doesn’t count as a theorem, not does it knock out the true theorem.
This also seems to be the way that aggregation works in legal reasoning: if a lawyer gives 10 arguments and 9 are wrong, that’s ok; only the valid argument counts.
I was thinking about this after seeing two recent examples:
1. Law professor Larry Lessig released a series of extreme arguments defending three discredited celebrities: Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, financier Jeffrey Epstein, and economist Francesca Gino. When looking into this, I was kinda surprised that Lessig, who is such a prominent law professor, was offering such weak arguments—but maybe I wasn’t accounting for the asymmetrical way in which legal arguments are received: you spray out lots of arguments, and the misses don’t count; all that matters is how many times you get a hit.
