COIN flips: American international relations and counter-insurgency

The essay examines the recent rehabilitation of counter-insurgency doctrine, especially as conducted by third party interveners. The advent of the refurbished US (United States) Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency field manual, a volume with scholarly self-presentation, is the focal point. This essay is concerned with the dubious bases of the doctrinal justifications driving recent US interventions. The Vietnam War turns out to be the crucial case for American scholars and policy-makers who have construed the history of counter-insurgency there as an unacknowledged success, which today has become the standard account in American International relations scholarship. The essay is a critical examination of this development and of its implications.     

Scientific and legal standards of statistical evidence in toxic tort and discrimination suits

Many legal disputes turn on scientific, especially statistical, evidence. Traditionally scientists have accepted only that statistical evidence which satisfies a 95 percent (or 99 percent) rule — that is, only evidence which has less than five percent (or one percent) probability of resulting from chance.The rationale for this rule is the reluctance of scientists to accept anything less than the best-supported new knowledge. The rule reflects the internal needs of scientific practice. However, when uncritically adopted as a rule for admitting legal evidence, the seemingly innocuous 95 percent rule distorts the balance of interests historically protected by the legal system. In particular, plaintiffs in toxic tort and employment discrimination suits are effectively held to a heavier burden of proof in showing that their injuries were more probably than not caused by the defendant's actions. The result is that too many victims of toxic torts or employment discrimination cannot win legal redress for their injuries.Proposals to adopt stringent scientific rules of evidence thus implicate significant philosophical issues about the relation of evidence to belief and to practical action. The underlying objectives of the tort law system are not those of scientific practice, and each set of objectives has standards of evidence specific to it.Previous versions of this paper were read at the UCLA Law and Philosophy Discussion Group and at the Orange County Moral and Political Philosophy Discussion Group. We have benefitted from comments by Steve Munzer, Peter Aranella, Craig Ihara, Gary Watson, David Estlund, and Alex Rosenberg. A longer version of this paper is in preparation. In that paper we hope to develop some of the items merely sketched in this paper.     

Did Disfranchisement Laws Help Elect President Bush? New Evidence on the Turnout Rates and Candidate Preferences of Florida’s Ex-Felons

This paper re-examines the impact of Florida’s disfranchisement law on the 2000 Presidential election. The analysis simulates outcomes in Florida under scenarios consistent with the turnout rates of Georgia and North Carolina ex-felons in 2000 and Florida ex-felons in 2008. Survey evidence on candidate preferences as well as data on ex-felon party registration in Florida and North Carolina are used to produce estimates of support for Bush and Gore among ex-felons. Based on the simulations, the ex-felon population in Florida would have favored Bush in 2000. Assuming that ex-felons supported Gore at rates similar to GSS respondents with at most a high school diploma, Bush would have defeated Gore by 4,925 and 7,048 votes, assuming turnout of 10 and 15%, respectively.