Eugene Volokh is one of the Top 20 Legal Thinkers in America! Or at least, he's one of the Top 20 most prominent and respected legal thinkers that blawg readers know about. The rest of the results of the Legal Affairs "poll" is available here. Of course, take the poll results for whatever they're worth.

  Eugene gets special billing in the poll results as a "Boy Wonder":

  Richard Posner was once the guiding light for legal academics charting a path to public intellectualism. His model: Augment a stellar scholarly reputation with a second career as a judge or lawyer; contribute regular commentary to places like The New York Times and The New Republic; please the media with a strong opinion on practically everything; and churn out a new book every six months (or at least make it feel like every six months). The rapid rise of Professor Eugene Volokh, however, suggests a new path. Not yet 37, Volokh has become famous enough to appear on our list despite never having written a general-interest book or taken a high profile case to court.
  Volokh, whose family emigrated from Kiev not long after his seventh birthday, is undeniably prodigious. By age 15, he had a B.S. from UCLA and was holding down a job as a computer programmer. He returned to UCLA to complete law school, landed two coveted clerkships—Ninth Circuit rabble-rouser Alex Kozinski followed by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor—and then joined the faculty of his alma mater. In a little over a decade, Volokh has produced a steady stream of provocative law review articles, establishing his bona fides in such disparate fields as gun control (which he vigorously opposes), free speech (which he feels is being squeezed by sexual harassment laws), and Yiddish (which he believes is "supplanting Latin as the spice in American legal argot"). He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford and Harvard and has literally written the book on being successful at academic legal writing. According to those who track such things, Professor Volokh has been cited by his peers over 800 times, putting him in a league more or less of his own.
  Impressive stuff, but enough to place him ahead of old-timers like Cass Sunstein, Ronald Dworkin, Larry Tribe, and Richard Epstein? Probably not, save for the fact that Volokh is also the founder of the eponymous Volokh Conspiracy, a blog launched in 2002. Not everything Volokh blogs about is strictly legal (posts like "Black Russian Cake" and his tireless, and tiresome, crusade against Slate's Bushisms come to mind), but in contrast to the approach of Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, a fellow law professor who is the USAToday of internet commentators, Professor Volokh avoids writing on topics outside his expertise. His site is now visited over 10,000 times per day. It's a pretty safe guess as to who most of those visitors are: law professors, judges, lawyers, and apparently our readers.

Thanks to Howard for the link.

  UPDATE: I just noticed that the Legal Affairs site notes that the magazine was "roundly criticized" for the list in the blogosphere, and concludes: "Look for bloggers to change their tune when they see how well-represented they are on our list." Huh? No change of tune from here. As I noted above, take the poll results for whatever they're worth.