Person:

Hay, Bruce

This paper is part of a symposium issue entitled "Law and Event," whose subject is the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. The paper offers a reading of "21 Grams," a film that treats in narrative terms some of the central problems addressed in Badiou's work, notably the connections between love, fate, and mathematics, and the mysterious nature of the "event" in history. The paper emphasizes the film's effort to blend Greek myth and philosophy, Christian theology, and modern chaos theory.

This essay, a contribution to a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the film 12 Angry Men, shows that the film is an intricate, carefully constructed allegory of a series of stories from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The essay offers some conjectures on the relation between the film's biblical subtext and its surface political themes.

Should the manufacturer of a product be held legally responsible when a consumer, while using the product, harms someone else? We show that if consumers have deep pockets, then manufacturer liability is not desirable. If homogeneous consumers have limited assets, then the best rule is "residual-manufacturer liability" where the manufacturer pays the shortfall in damages not paid by the consumer. Residual-manufacturer liability distorts the market quantity when consumers' willingness to pay is correlated with their propensity to cause harm. It distorts product safety when consumers differ in their wealth levels. In both cases, consumer-only liability may be preferred.

Wigmore's ‘The Problem of Proof’, published in 1913, was a path-breaking attempt to systematize the process of drawing inferences from trial evidence. In this paper, written for a conference on visual approaches to evidence, I look at the Wigmore article in relation to cubist art, which coincidentally made its American debut in New York and Chicago the same spring that the article appeared. The point of the paper is to encourage greater attention to the complex meanings embedded in visual diagrams, meanings overlooked by the prevailing cognitive scientific approaches to the Wigmore method.