Violent Origins of Law

The origins of Zipf's meaning-frequency law

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two assumptions: that words follow Zipf’s law for word frequencies (a power law dependency between frequency and rank) and Zipf’s law of meaning distribution (a power law...

Aggression, science, and law: The origins framework

Compression and the origins of Zipf's law of abbreviation

Languages across the world exhibit Zipf’s law of abbreviation, namely more frequent words tend to be shorter. The generalized version of the law an inverse relationship between the frequency of a unit and its magnitude holds also for the behaviors of other species and the genetic code. The apparent universality of this pattern in human language and its ubiquity in other domains calls for a theo...

Compression and the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies

Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf’s law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot’s random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random typing: (1) it starts from realistic cognitive pressures (2) it does not require fine tuning of parameters and (3) it sheds light on the origins of other statistical laws of langu...

The Origins of Public Prosecution at Common Law

However fundamental he may appear to us, the public prosecutor was an historical latecomer. Judge and jury we can trace back to the high Middle Ages. But the prosecutor became a regular figure of Anglo-American criminal procedure only in Tudor times. Further, his appearance then has not been noticed in our historical literature, an especially remarkable omission when we discover that the prosec...