How to Have Hope: Musings on How to Achieve Cooperation and Peace Using Law, Math, and Physics

Political violence is undoubtedly a reality in this country, and is more obvious every day. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is just one small example, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, and efforts to celebrate his death should also be condemned in the strongest possible terms.  (Whether individuals who spoke out against him like Jimmy Kimmel should be silenced by their employers is a question that is an open question legally depending on the type of employer, given the speech in many cases has nothing to do with an individual's duties on the job, and thus is  the type of speech that an employer arguably should not care about under well respected First Amendment caselaw governing employer ability's to curb employee speech out of the workplace that turns on the type of the speech and whether it is relevant to an employees duties on the job, as opposed to their personal viewpoints, and may be protected under the Supreme Court's decision in Pickering ...

Today, t he New York Times has an article about parenting and parents taking photographs of their minor children, and whether such photos can be considered the equivalent of a #MeToo issue . I have expertise related to this question, as well as the #MeToo movement, based on my career as a former litigator, as well  as an early article I wrote about involving a U.S. Supreme Court decision involving computer generated images of child pornograp hy, which the Court said were protected in an opinion by Justice Kennedy , who discussed the fact that there should be no such thing as "thought crime."  Thought crime, which Justice Kennedy cared deeply about given his Russian heritage and views on totalitarianism and book burning (which also occurred in Nazi Germany), should not be a crime. If someone thinks something in law, but doesn't act on it, unlike in certain religious venues where thoughts can be "sinful" even if they are never acted upon, does not exist and there...

 I love chemistry, and was one of the top students in my introductory chemistry class in college. It's been years since I've done chemistry, and I was terrible in the lab because I had poor fine motor skills, though I did invent a protocol for understanding adult neurogenesis in rats, which is the ability of traumatized rats to rewire their synapses to overcome PTSD. That was at the Veteran's Hospital in White River Junction, Vermont. At any rate, today I discovered that my chemistry abilities have been revived from nowhere, and that I could read a famous article on chemistry by Alan Turing . Chemistry may be very important to an experiment I want to conduct using liquid helium to test forces that in my belief compel pure cooperation (which means quasi-particles or particles act in a certain way) under a phase transition. What this heck does this have to do with law? Actually, physicists should get the first "shot" of answering this one. There's an entire bran...

Today, I resume posting from a hiatus because I was moving across the country and relocating to my new job at the University of Tulsa College of Law. I announced yesterday on LinkedIn that I have a new pre-print that is close to done of an article that I plan to submit to Nature . But I'm looking for readers to vet this, and for a senior co-author because I don't have a PhD, though I'd characterize myself as a "savant" in math. I'm reading a wonderful new book by Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, and my strong recommendation is "buy it, immediately!" Du Sautoy's book has relevance to law and economics because mathematics is relevant to so many disciplines, including architecture. I'm also looking into this topic right now for a law review version of the pre-print I'm writing. But one fact that du Sautoy relates is that brutalist buildings designed in a minimalist style, often premised on efficiency (think John Nash) instead of belong...

There is a common phrase:  "Never meet your heroes."   I don't know the exact etymology of this phrase, but presumably this means they will disappoint whoever meets them and they turn out to be highly imperfect and flawed humans who present an amazing public image but if a person really gets to know them, or puts them under a microscope, a person will discover profound flaws.  This happened to me yesterday - though metaphorically, not literally. I adore and love the book  Calculus: Early Transcendentals   by James Stewart. And I even recommended it on LinkedIn yesterday in response to a post about true mathematicians who can't read a math textbook without yelling at it. I guess that means I'm officially a mathematician. I was working through a problem on ordinary differential equations.  This is like the  mistake I caught at MIT.  Forgive the tech issues, blogger refused to load my equations so I had to take a screenshot from Word. And Blogge...

I want to recount an anecdote from my Fourth of July that should indicate the turmoil this country is facing. I live in Oakland, California, one of the most diverse places in all of California. I walked out the door this afternoon before I went to spend the Fourth of July with family, and I noticed one of my neighbors in Rockridge where I live - a peaceful neighborhood that has families and renters of all races - flying an upside U.S. flag. I became instantly distressed, and when the person who picked me up saw me, she immediately noticed. I want to call attention to the origins of the upside down flag, which I didn't know about until the scandal with Justice Alito flying the upside down flag around Trump's election.  This is technically illegal under the U.S. Code, though it's also free speech protected by Cohen v. California , if that case is even still good law. My understanding of the upside down American flag is that it is used as a symbol of white Christian nationali...