See J.D. Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt 3 (2007).

Richard B. Parkinson & R.S. Simpson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment 12 (1999) (“the Rosetta Stone, famous for the texts inscribed upon its surface which have made it an icon of all decipherments and of all attempts to access the ancient past on its own terms”); id. at 25-26 (stating the Rosetta Stone is inscribed “with a priestly decree–the Memphis Decree–concerning the cult of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes”).

Rosetta Stone, Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/167583 [http://perma.cc/EHL7-DF5C] (using “Rosetta Stone” to define a thing that acts as “a key to some previously undecipherable mystery or unattainable knowledge”).

And, if only there had remained any practicing members of the Cult of Ptolemy V in 1799 when the Stone was discovered, information could surely have flowed in both directions.

Andrew Verstein, The Jurisprudence of Mixed Motives, 127 Yale L.J. 1106 (2018).

Martin Katz, A Rosetta Stone for Causation, 127 Yale L.J. F. 877, 880 (2018).

Id. at 884.

Id. at 884.

Id. at 888. For Katz, the answer emerges from his embrace of a version of mental-causation. He takes motive to be a causal phenomenon, and he finds quantification natural to causation. Id. at 885-88. However natural it is to derive quantification from causation, causes are not the only things that we can express as vectors, and there is no reason to think that causation is a necessary premise in Cartesian motive depictions.

See generally Stephen E. Fienberg & Mark J. Schervish, The Relevance of Bayesian Inference for the Presentation of Statistical Evidence and for Legal Decisionmaking, 66 B.U. L. Rev. 771, 782-83 (1986) (listing criticisms of numerical approaches).

See, e.g., Ronald J. Allen & Brian Leiter, Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence, 87 Va. L. Rev. 1491, 1507 (2001).

Laurence Tribe, Trial by Mathematics: Precision and Ritual in the Legal Process, 84 Harv. L. Rev. 1329, 1361-65 (1971).

Katz, supra note 6, at 889-92.

Id. at 890.

Id. at 890.

Id. at 900.

They have been “used to describe causal relationships for millennia.” Id. at 879.

See, e.g., Verstein, supra note 5, at 1125 n.83 (sufficiency and using many causal terms); id. at 1128 n.88 (necessity and sufficiency); id. at 1130 nn.94 & 96 (using many causal terms including necessity and sufficiency); id. at 1146-47 (insufficiency); id. at 1153 (sufficiency); id. at 1156 (sufficiency and necessity); id. at 1160-62 (sufficiency).

See, e.g., Gardner, The Mens Rea Enigma: Observations on the Role of Motive in the Criminal Law Past and Present, Utah L. Rev. 635, 748 (1993) (arguing for character-related motive analysis in criminal sentencing).

See Univ. of Tex. Sw. Med. Ctr. v. Nassar, 133 S. Ct. 2517, 2524-25 (2013); Gross v. FBL Fin. Services, 557 U.S. 167, 176-77 (2009); Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S 228, 263 (1989); id. at 259 (White, J., concurring); id. at 262 (O’Connor, J., concurring); id. at 279 (Kennedy, J., dissenting);

See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1888); J.L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Human Nature (1980).

See United States v. Generes, 405 U.S. 93, 103-105 (1972) (considering policy arguments for why the tort concept of causation “has little place in tax law where plural aspects are not usual, where an item either is or is not a deduction, or either is or is not a business bad debt, and where certainty is desirable”); see also Weddle v. Comm’r of Internal Revenue, 325 F.2d 849, 852 (2d Cir. 1963) (Lumbard, C.J., concurring) (“To import notions of proximate causation distilled from the great body of tort law into consideration of § 166 is of little value, because factors such as time, space, and foreseeability, and the very basic notion of causation in fact which underlies the law of proximate causation are by their nature incapable of application to a problem which requires dissection of different motivations toward a similar objective.”).

Katz, supra note 6, at 877.

Id. at 877 n.1.

Id. at 887-88.

Katz, supra note 6, at 886 n.24.

Katz, supra note 6, at 882 n.17.

E.g., Katko v. Briney, 183 N.W.2d 657 (Iowa 1971).

Verstein, supra note 5, at 1138, 1141, 1152, 1160.

See, e.g., id. at 1132, 1137 n.112, 1153. I also use the word “prompt,” id. at 1125, and “spur,” id. at 1126.

It is worth noticing that everyday experience with motive seems open to noncausal conceptions of strength. Introspection suggests that we can have motives of varying magnitude even if we do not feel deterministically compelled by them. Such observations are the starting point for jurists and philosophers seeking a non-causal understanding of motive. It is a virtue of my approach that it accommodates the lived experience of motive as well as the causal conception Katz proposes.

Charles A. Sullivan, Tortifying Employment Discrimination, 92 B.U. L. Rev. 1431 (2012).

United States v. Generes, 405 U.S. 93, 103-105 (1972) (rejecting tort causation as a useful framework for a tax mixed-motives case).

Katz, supra note 6, at 907.