Author Archive | Ilya Somin

Most arguments for originalism either claim that judges follow the original meaning of the Constitution because that’s what the people “consented” to, or because doing so promotes democracy. Some originalists also claim that their methodology does a better job of constraining judges than do other approaches to constitutional interpretation. Although I am very sympathetic to […]

The newly renamed Antitrust and Competition Policy Blog has lots of interesting posts by my college classmate and University of Wisconsin visiting fellow Danny Sokol, an expert on international trade and antitrust law. Much of his work deals with competition policy in Europe, Latin America, and developing countries. I’m all in favor of competition, including […]

[IMPORTANT UPDATE: In light of the latest news, I no longer think this is happening. See my latest post above.] I’m not entirely sure I know what to make of Attorney General Gonzales’s letter today about the NSA surveillance program, but I wonder if I’m quirky in reading it possibly to mean that DOJ found […]

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has an excellent column on the contradiction between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror in Afghanistan. As I have explained time and again (see here, here, and here), our efforts to eradicate poppy production in Afghanistan are driving many Afghan peasants into the arms of the Taliban, […]

as the influential saxophonist Michael Brecker succumbed to leukemia at the age of 57 and pianist Alice Coltrane (John Coltrane’s wife) died of respiratory failure at the age of 69. Coltrane’s last recording was issued in 2004; Brecker wrapped up his final album just two weeks ago, and it will be released posthumously.

Like Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds, I too am a big fan of John Scalzi’s recent Science fiction books Old Man’s War and Ghost Brigades. But the New York Times was wrong to describe the Volokh Conspiracy and Glenn as “conservative” in its review of Scalzi’s works. More fundamentally, it is not clear to me […]

University of Chicago Law Professor Richard Epstein and I have coauthored an op ed in the National Law Journal urging the Supreme Court to review the important eminent domain case of Didden v. Village of Port Chester. Here’s an excerpt: The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London generated a […]

In his recent year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts has renewed his call for an increase in judicial pay, claiming that the problem has “now reached the level of a constitutional crisis and threatens to undermine the strength and independence of the federal judiciary.” Longtime VC readers will […]

I agree with most of the points Eugene made on this subject in his posts below. In particular, it’s important to remember 1) that many other valuable institutions also have important downsides, and 2) that even if we need a strong federal role for the protection of certain kinds of minority rights, that does not […]

In this column, Bruce Bartlett explains why the Libertarian Party is bad for the cause of libertarianism. He concludes that the LP “must die for libertarian ideas to succeed.” I have held a similar view for years. More precisely, while I think that libertarian ideas can achieve some success even in spite of the LP, […]

In a recent post and comments, co-blogger David Bernstein and Judge Michael McConnell debate the question of whether a majority of the public has “accepted” the nearly unlimited federal power to engage in “economic” regulation reflected in cases such as Wickard v. Filburn and, most recently, Gonzales v. Raich, and whether they would have been […]

Judge Michael McConnell’s critical review of Justice Breyer’s recent book Active Liberty overlaps in some ways with my own critique of the same book, recently published in the Northwestern Law Review. But, interestingly, the similarities are probably outweighed by the differences. Although I agree with most of Judge McConnell’s points, and he might agree with […]

The Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville has recently hired University of Minnesota law professor Jim Chen as its next dean. Chen is a prominent legal scholar in several fields, and also a major advocate of Moneyball hiring strategies in legal academia, which he writes about on his highly recommended Money Law […]

One of the relatively few underanalyzed major topics in the extensive academic literature on federalism is the relationship between federalism and totalitarianism. A potential advantage of decentralized federalism is that it might serve as an obstacle to the establishment of an oppressive totalitarian state. Yet most scholars have largely ignored this possibility. One writer who […]

Today, December 17, is the first day of the traditional week-long ancient Roman festival of