Author Archive | David Post

A press release from Grove Press describes the forthcoming novel by Saira Rao (entitled “Chambermaid”) this way: The devil holds a gavel in this wickedly entertaining debut novel about a young attorney’s eventful year clerking for a federal judge. Sheila Raj is a recent graduate of a top-ten law school with dreams of working for […]

The Washington Post reports that newly-elected Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, will be sworn in by Speaker Nancy Pelosi with his right hand on a copy of the Koran. And not just any Koran — the copy owned by Thomas Jefferson himself (which Mark Dimunation, who is originally from […]

It’s the time of year when we law professors, working on getting our exams ready (and then graded) and preparing our reading lists for next semester, can best contemplate the many, many oddities of the law school educational process. Here’s one with which I’ve become increasingly obsessed over the past few years: our bizarre insistence […]

Those of us who write for the VC blog got an interesting offer the other day from the folks setting up a new online karaoke site at singshot.com the other day: If we recorded and posted one of our own karaoke performances, they’d donate $500 bucks to a charity of our choice. What a deal! […]

Some of you may recall the weird story of a few years ago, when one of the giant balloons at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York (the 60-foot tall “Cat in the Hat,” in fact) came loose, crashed into a streetlamp, and fractured the skull of one of the onlookers below. And most […]

This article in Leeds Today, on the forgotten St. Edmund, says they did: In the wake of the Norman Conquest of 1066, everything connected to the English nation and its culture were suppressed – especially the language, literature, and flags. French became the language of everyday life. . . . [N]ot until the reign of […]

is bootylicious, first documented in 1994. Now I understand meaning #2, “Esp. of a woman, often with reference to the buttocks: sexually attractive, sexy; shapely.” But what about meaning #1: “Of rap lyrics: bad, weak. rare“? Is it really an insult for a rapper to tell another rapper that his rhymes were bootylicious? The statements […]

This is cool.

I live in Virginia and am looking at various Allen/Webb materials. But suppose I don’t care about Allen’s business interests, use of racial slurs, or Jewish heritage, or about Webb’s graphic novels. Does anyone have any input on whether — based on his policy positions — Allen is one of the best of the Republican […]

Since, as I say, I see no sense in the public-private distinction, neither do I see what precisely it consists of. Richardson v. McKnight, 521 U.S. 399, 422 (1997). O.K., so it’s taken out of context. But what a fun sentence to take out of context!

I gather that my argument about the unconstitutionality of the Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (which Tom Bell has nicely dubbed the UnInGen-ious Act”)is not passing the Volokh Conspiracy hoo-ha test … Sigh. But here’s another thought. The law, oddly enough, does not make it unlawful to engage in gambling over the Internet. (Of course, it’s […]

I know there are more important things going on in the world, but the Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, recently signed into law, really has me steamed. And not only because it has caused one (but, fortunately, only one) of my internet gambling sites to close out my account. There are many grounds upon […]

Last week it was the Deutsche Opera’s announcement that it was cancelling future performances of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” because one of the scenes in the production involves showing the decapitated head of Mohammed (and Jesus, Poseidon, and Buddha as well) and because of post-Danish-cartoon-imbroglio fears of a violent reaction. This week, another brouhaha is afoot. The […]

It struck me again today, from some flyer I noticed lying around, how peculiar it is that our two major political parties are represented by (1) a donkey and (2) an elephant. There are reasons, I suspect, that one never hears of the University of X Donkeys playing the Y State Elephants on Saturday afternoons […]

Eugene’s interesting post about the use of pop lyrics in judicial opinions and law reviews reminded me of something I wrote a long time ago (November 1995, to be precise). It was actually written in response to a suggestion made by none other than our own Eugene Volokh, who once had offhandedly remarked that it […]