Author Archive | Ilya Somin

The Daily Progress (Charlottesville) reports: Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Jim Webb of Falls Church is one of several candidates whose full names have been cut off the final page of the electronic ballot voters will use this year in Charlottesville, Falls Church and Alexandria. Election officials said it’s possible that some confusion may result when […]

The “This article is copyright protected and Fair Use is not applicable” line seemingly no longer appears in new articles on the North Country Gazette site, but the “In accordance with Fair Use of Copyright: WE FORBID ANY REPRODUCTION in part or in whole of The North Country Gazette” remains on the front page. Why […]

VC readers in the Philadelphia area may be interested to know that I will be speaking at UPenn Law School this Wednesday (12 noon-1:20, Silverman Hall, Rm. 240-B) on Kelo v. City of New London, eminent domain abuse, and prospects for reform. If you read the VC and come to the speech, come up and […]

Jonathan Adler’s post below highlights the seemingly surprising fact that the conservative College Republicans are the largest and possibly most unified student group at the generally very liberal University of Californiat at Berkeley. This fact, however, is not as strange as it seems. Basic collective action theory, as outlined in Mancur Olson’s classic work The […]

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Court has handed down its decision, in Western Seafood Co. v. City of Freeport, a noteworthy post-Kelo eminent domain case that I blogged about back in June (hat tip to Wright Gore, President of the Western Seafood Company). Western Seafood involves the condemnation of part of […]

Political scientist Daniel Drezner has responded to my post praising the use of Moneyball hiring methods in academia. As I noted in the earlier post, Moneyball academic hiring uses statistical and other scientific methods to identify undervalued scholars who are likely to be more productive than the rest of the market (which may rely on […]

Jane Galt/Megan McArdle raises some objections to the Iraqi oil trust plan endorsed by Hillary Clinton, Vernon Smith, and yours truly (while accidentally confusing me with Orin Kerr). Some of her points have merit, but all share the common flaw of failing to consider the alternative: largely unrestricted government control of Iraq’s oil wealth. Here […]

In this recent interview, Hillary Clinton (a figure with whom I rarely agree on much else) endorses an idea that I have argued for myself (see here, here, and here): a federalist system for Iraq under which each individual Iraqi citizen gets to have a share of the nation’s oil wealth: I recommended in ’03 […]

To mark the occasion of the Detroit Tigers’ recent upset playoff victory over the Yankees, ESPN.com has compiled this list of great Yankees playoff collapses. I realize, of course, that a key reason why the Yankees have had so many playoff collapses is that they get to the postseason so often (roughly once every two […]

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin is scheduled to be published next spring, according to this Boston Globe article (hat tip to my Amherst College classmate David Lobron). Because Tolkien, who died in 1973, never finished the book, the published version is based on a manuscript “reconstructed” from Tolkien’s notes by the author’s son Christopher […]

Back in 2002, co-conspirator Randy Barnett published an op ed providing a list of steps that conservative Republicans could take to increase their appeal to libertarians without abandoning their own principles. The current internet debate about “libertarian Democrats” gave me the idea of creating a similar list for liberal Democrats. I have deliberately confined my […]

The internet is abuzz with controversy over Markos Moulitsas’ (A.K.A. – DailyKos) argument for “libertarian Democrats,” the claim that the Democratic Party, if given power, is likely to promote libertarian values, or at least do so to a much greater extent than Republicans have. Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council, and liberal economist Mark […]

The Oakland A’s have just won their first playoff series of the Billy Beane/Moneyball era, sweeping the favored Minnesota Twins in three straight games. As described in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, A’s General Manager Billy Beane pioneered the use of statistical analysis to guide personnel decisions in major league baseball. Thanks in large part to […]

The 16,170 downloads that he got for this paper have enabled the author to rise to the top of the Social Science Research Network’s rankings for legal scholars with the most downloads over the last 12 months. When I post my next paper on SSRN, I’m going to have to seriously consider putting some words […]

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently signed into law five almost completely ineffectual post-Kelo eminent domain reform laws. Tim Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation has a series of excellent posts that explain in detail why these laws do almost nothing to curb eminent domain abuse in California (here is the first of his five posts). […]