Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

My wife and I just got home from seeing Act of Valor.  We both liked it very much, but I would be curious to know reader reactions from folks who have seen the movie.

Eugene, A very happy birthday from all of us! Your co-conspirators, readers, and commenters.

Update: Oral argument transcripts: Kiobel and Mohamad.  My very quick impression from skimming the transcripts is that the Court will divide 5-4 in favor of not finding corporate liability. Today the Supreme Court is hearing oral argument in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum (and a companion case) – one of the more important and interesting […]

In honor of the Oscars – to which, however, I’m completely indifferent and am not watching – it occurs to me to ask:  given the Rise of the Drones, and all the various social, political, and legal issues they seem to be raising, from privacy to terrorism, what kinds of movies or TV shows should […]

All is proceeding as my colleague Anna Gelpern has foreseen. Indeed. Years ago, she mentioned to me in passing that the markets seemed remarkably unaware, or anyway remarkably sanguine, about the question of whether local law (e.g., Greek law) or foreign law (e.g., English law) governed as the choice-of-law clause for the vast tonnage of […]

Over at the Lawfare blog, Sonia McNeil (a student at Harvard Law School who assists me with the Book Review there) sums up the issues surrounding the Stolen Valor Act and last Wednesday’s oral argument in the related case of United States v. Alvarez.  It is a fine, short discussion that includes links to the […]

I don’t see how this is going to go as planned:   More than 160 German financial services executives are willing to come to Greece in order to strengthen the Greek tax mechanism, according to a report to be published in the German magazine ‘Wirtschafts Woche’ … The magazine cites German deputy finance minister Hans […]

Comments are open.

For the philosophically-inclined, the Concurring Opinions blog has an excellent roundtable discussion of a new book, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, by Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White.  Great lineup of academic commentators, and responses from the authors.  If you are interested in robots, artificial intelligence, autonomy, and related topics from a legal […]

(Update: Thanks to Insta for the link – readers who want the scoop from an actual property law professor should read Co-Conspirator Ilya’s post on this topic, here. My thanks to him for weighing in.) By now many will have seen the news stories reporting how an animal rights group sent up a small drone […]

Trendy supply meets trendy demand in the form of university courses offering to explain the Occupy movement. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Glenn Reynolds offers some suggestions on items to include in the course syllabus; he generously quotes me, from a post several months back here at Volokh, “The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites.” […]

Over at the Opinio Juris blog, I’ve been raising questions about the EU, governance, and the eurozone crisis.   My most recent query was how, from a legal standpoint, the withdrawal or expulsion of Greece from the eurozone might actually take place.  Everyone is talking about it, it seems – or tweeting about it, at […]

http://fosslien.com/heart/. Megan McArdle asks how the physical university will survive the coming disintermediation of higher education.  I don’t think the answer is superior learning or even superior credentials.  It’s assortative mating.  Assortative mating works best when the cognitive elites are able to combine signaling behaviors for their superior genes, particularly for doing economics, with the […]

The Legal Adviser to the Department of State, Harold Koh, delivered the keynote address at a UVA Law School conference on issues of conflicts over sovereign equality on Friday morning.  Notre Dame professor Roger Alford (who delivered a paper on the Lago Agrio Ecuador dispute at the conference) comments on Dean Koh’s speech at Opinio […]