Blindspot

A BLOG ABOUT LAW, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Oct 14, 2017
6 min

Finding Trump’s Core

Leading media outlets increasingly recognize that Donald Trump lacks what game theorists refer to as a core. See here and here. An empty core is a technical term that implies a game lacking a dominant outcome or set of outcomes. A core generally corresponds to what is called a pure-Nash equilibrium, after John Nash, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics in large part for recognizing the concept. See here; for the book version, see here; or for the movie version, see here.

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Max Stearns

May 12, 2017
8 min

Cycling, Consciousness, and Humanity (part II): Our Institutional Minds

My prior post on this topic, see here, posited that consciousness reflects an endless series of developed responses to cycling patterns in the "Era of Evolutionary Adaptation" (EEA). I offered examples of emotional and cognitive cycles, along with several potential defenses. I will now add two points: First, our imperfect institutions mirror our imperfect minds. Second, just as human imperfections are embedded in our institutions, see The Federalist 51 (James Madison), availa

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Max Stearns

May 3, 2017
7 min

Cycling, Consciousness, and Humanity (part I): General Framing

Our minds wander. We lose focus, or we focus on things that distract from what we intend to be doing. Our minds also cycle, taking us on emotional or cognitive loops, perhaps in ways that merely distract, and perhaps in ways that help define us as conscious, sentient beings, or more simply as human. In this initial post on the topic, I propose something audacious: emotional or cognitive cycling helps to explain consciousness, and perhaps what it means to be human. Opposite ex

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Max Stearns

Apr 26, 2017
5 min

Collecting's Existential Crisis

This post is inspired by my sister, Wendy Bornstein, who wrote a beautiful blogpost on the challenges that she and I faced in dealing with our parents' estate after my father and mother passed away in 2013 and 2015, respectively (see http://tinyurl.com/k7hjxam). My parents never had much money, and finances were always tight when my sister and I were growing up. My mother was a teacher by training and for her early career, and my father, whose formal education ended with an A

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Maxwell Stearns

I have been teaching law for twenty-nine years, and I am the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. My core areas of interest are Constitutional Law and Law & Economics, which I view as critically interwoven. My most recent book is titled Law and Economics: Private and Public (West Academic 2018, with Todd Zywicki and Tom Miceli). In this poster, recently created by the Maryland Carey Law Thurgood Marshall Law Library, I am pictured with several wonderful books that I've recommended to friends, family, and students.