Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

I’m about to teach an Administrative Law elective for 1Ls. Because it’s for 1Ls, I want to have a book with less reading — for instance, the standard Gellhorn & Byse is probably too long and detailed for 1Ls. I’d prefer to have a book where I can assign 600-700 pages. With that in mind, […]

“Charlie” or “104” for short, born 8/12/08 at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. For those of you who follow the stats, he weighed 9.5 lobsters at birth and was 21.5 inches long. (Bonus points if you can figure out why he’s 104. [UPDATE: The answer is in the fourth comment to this post, so if […]

My answer to Orin is that “law” can validly mean many things, depending on the context and what you want to use it for. For instance, Holmes — explaining his famous “bad man” view of the law — says that law is “the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact.” (See The Path […]

In general, I endorse the is/ought distinction, in law as in other places. When Orin tells you what Supreme Court doctrine says, it doesn’t mean he endorses it as the correct doctrine, the correct understanding of the Constitution, or whatever. However, I think the line may be a wee bit fuzzier than Orin lets on. […]

Does anyone have recommendations for a good book to read about the Civil War? Here are my criteria: It should be written by a serious historian. (But it doesn’t have to be academic — if you think The Civil War for Dummies or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Civil War are good, feel free […]

on a Friday the 13th (like today), my family, including Eugene and me, left the Soviet Union.

I’m delighted to report that I’ve accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Emory Law School, in Atlanta. That position will start in Fall ’09. During the ’08-’09 academic year (while my wife clerks for Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith in Houston), I’ll be a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Houston Law Center.

Does anyone have a copy of Durrenmatt’s Der Besuch der alten Dame in German? If it contains the “Anmerkung” at the end (in German), I would appreciate a copy of that part, with the title pages. Thanks!

Oh wait, I mean Microsoft and Yahoo! … which does smell, to me, a lot like the AOL-Time catastrophe of just a few years past. The aging giant of days of yore (that would be Microsoft) looking for a way to get hip (that would be Yahoo!) and BIG in a hurry. But (you heard […]

Those who are interested in Mike Abramowicz’s prediction markets posts may also be interested in this new NBER working paper I just saw on SSRN: Historians have long wondered whether the Southern Confederacy had a realistic chance at winning the American Civil War. We provide some quantitative evidence on this question by introducing a new […]

The Muttonhead Quail has been found:

I invite everyone to join the Muttonhead Quail Movement group on Facebook.

In my last post about vampires, I recommended Paul Bibeau’s Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man’s Quest to Live in the World of the Undead. I’ve now finished the book, and here are a couple more funny snippets: “I was having parties, orgies with hot Dutch girls, and going to England on […]

I’ve just started reading Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man’s Quest to Live in the World of the Undead, by Paul Bibeau. As the back cover explains: At eight years old, Paul Bibeau had the footie pj’s scared off of him when his sister sprang out of a crawlspace in the dark […]

has gone to, among others, my former professor, Eric Maskin. Rather than try to summarize his accomplishments myself, I’ll just refer you for now to Marginal Revolution (actually, just go to the main page, as there are a bunch of posts, and there may be more later) and the sources linked there.