Ronald Coase’s paper “The Problem of Social Cost,” which we discussed in class, has attracted a lot of attention. David D. Friedman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University, has written a short essay on it.
In class on March 7, during our discussion of conceptions of equality, Michael Walzer’s idea of “spheres of justice” was mentioned. It was also mentioned on that day in the magazine Slate, in a discussion of “Equality at the Airport” (on lines of different lengths for flyers of different statuses).
In class on March 21, we discussed Arrow’s impossibility theorem. For an application of this theorem to a real-world problem, see this discussion of the problem of aggregating different judges’ rankings of figure skaters into one overall ranking.