I thought I knew every squirrelly thing about paradoxes and the Constitution, most of them having to do with the Electoral College, but I learned a new one tonight: the Alabama paradox, which is named for the potential 1880 victim of the mathematical quirk whereby some apportionment methods may, in some circumstances, result in a state losing representation even as the number of total representatives increase. There's also the population paradox, whereby a state with a higher population growth rate can lose representatives to a state with a lower population growth rate, again because of rounding issues. This page has some javascript examples.

Link.

I know I haven't been posting much lately here, but if you're looking for a blog, you should be reading my favorite non-legal blog, Marginal Revolution, daily for nifty tidbits like this one:

Total tsunami foreign aid from the U.S.: $908 million

U.S. tariff revenue from Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, and Indonesia: $1.87 billion

Plus a very sensible analysis of the Apple-giveaway-disaster in Richmond. The government there wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money by not selling the machines on Ebay or using a real market mechanism, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars of resident time that could've been better spent on volunteer work than waiting in line, and taxpayers will probably be hit when the lawsuits from the injured start rolling in.

Speaking of lawsuits, it's amazing how much working on consumer fraud class action lawsuits changes your way of thinking. Why, just the other day, I bought a variety six-pack of sugar-free Jello that was labelled "Lemon-Lime/Orange," but it had four green cups and only two orange cups. Failure to disclose! Consumer fraud! I just need a Nobel Prize-winning expert to proclaim that I've been damaged several dollars in my expected consumer surplus, multiplied over millions of cups sold, ask for punitive damages, find a judge willing to certify the class, and I have myself a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Ridiculous, to be sure, but no more so than the one that awarded $10 billion over Philip Morris's light cigarettes.

As it turns out, the lemon-lime Jello is pretty tasty, so I'm not going to complain, but such forbearance will surely keep me from being wealthy enough to hold Mark Lanier-style Christmas parties.

In case you're not keeping up with me on Overlawyered and Point of Law (and why not?), I was in National Review this week, and National Journal a couple of weeks ago.

Life imitates Futurama. The robot doesn't look quite as impressive close up (cf. the Uncanny Valley, discussed here), but we seem to be much further along than I would've thought. (Post title clip)