We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The...

Consider a type of argument that is familiar in legal scholarship, such a commonplace in fact that its structure may lurk unnoticed in the background by the reader. The argument proceeds like this: (1) Here is some legal doctrine or rule; (2) courts and scholars (or at least my rivals) tend to think that its point, rationale, purpose, or function is X—that is, the doctrine is “all about” X; (3)...

A recent consensus has emerged within peace operations doctrine validating “robust” or “assertive” peacekeeping as an effective mechanism to intervene in complex and volatile intrastate conflicts. The assertion of the validity of “robust peacekeeping” is problematic due to a lack of empirical evidence supporting the application of this management tool. Yet the similarity between the context and...

The state action doctrine receives relatively little attention in the Federal Trade Commission/Department of Justice 2004 report on competition in the health care sector. Not surprisingly, the report focuses primarily on urging states to reconsider specific laws that tend to restrict competition in health care markets but that are clearly shielded by the state action doctrine. Relatively little...

The BioLogos Foundation • www.BioLogos.org/projects/scholar-essays 1 In teaching at an evangelical liberal arts college that holds firmly to the inspiration and authority of Scripture, I find most of my students think the biblical doctrine of creation (DoC) is limited to two points: (1) God created out of nothing (ex nihilo) and (2) God created the world in six days (whatever they think “days” ...

This essay provides a close reading of Karl Barth's doctrine of election, attending not only to his argument but also to the patterns of his rhetoric and to his idiosyncratic use of terminology in order to uncover the theological logic that drives his doctrine, and thus to assess its validity. Particular attention is given to the telos of election as Barth conceived it, his theological method, ...

The constitution of multi-level databases integrating, for example, both prosodic and morphosyntactic levels of representation presents a number of problems, some specific to the individual domains, and others concerning the integration of the two domains. It is argued that the formalism of annotation graphs provides an adequate solution to these problems, which can be implemented in an XML rep...

We employ the Deep Q-Learning algorithm with Experience Replay to train an agent capable of achieving a high-level of play in the L-Game while selflearning from low-dimensional states. We also employ variable batch size for training in order to mitigate the loss of the rare reward signal and significantly accelerate training. Despite the large action space due to the number of possible moves, t...

A muscle will not function properly if the bone to which it is attached is broken or is in a state of degeneration. The same is true of the Christian life. Orthodoxy serves as the skeletal framework for the saint of God. If that framework is faulty and does not affirm truth, the result will be a defective lifestyle. In the Epistle to the Colossians Paul demonstrated this point. The Colossian co...