Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

Remember the lawsuit challenging the qualifications of the Deputy Director of the Patent & Trademark Office? As was hinted at in the first two comments to that post a few months ago, Hanah Metchis Volokh, a recent addition to the clan, has just written what is sure to become the definitive piece on the subject, […]

A fascinating student note from the Minnesota Law Review, not so much for its subject matter as for how it came to be published. Here’s what the note is about. From its introduction (paragraph breaks added): This Note argues that because law is limited to placing external constraints on human behavior, religion, through its capacity […]

Someone just dropped by my office asking for one Caryn Voland, an admissions officer here at Georgetown Law with an office number similar to my own. See how life imitates art: This is how Bulgakov, in his novel The Master and Margarita, describes the aftermath of the plot involving the character Voland, who is Satan […]

I’m delighted to report that my new article, Choosing Interpretive Methods: A Positive Theory of Judges and Everyone Else, is going to be published in the June 2008 issue of the NYU Law Review. Here’s the abstract: In this Article, I propose a theory of how rational, ideologically motivated judges might choose interpretive methods, and […]

I recall hearing an expression something along the lines of “Once you say something three times in Washington, it’s true.” Has anyone ever heard that, and do you know where it (or something like it) comes from?

Have some pro-life people argued that, in light of the great evil of abortion, judges ought to bend the law (to the extent they can get away with) to pursue pro-life policies? Please be as specific as possible.

This whole series of posts just underscores why I don’t like the words “descriptivism” and “prescriptivism.” When one says one’s a descriptivist, this immediately makes people think one doesn’t want to prescribe. This is of course completely false, and I would have thought that my posts (and Eugene’s) would have put that idea to rest. […]

While composing my last post, I spilled some tea on my keyboard. I opened an empty browser window while attacking the affected keys with my napkin, so as not to mess up any of my already-open windows. When I looked up at the screen again, I had navigated to the Universitet i Oslo.

In my last post, I quickly pooh-poohed the idea that, when someone talks about “correct” English, they mean inherently right (as opposed to good for a particular goal): Because when different people are speaking mutually incomprehensibly, this is as if one were speaking German and the other were speaking Spanish. Nothing inherently wrong with that. […]

Eugene and I think fairly similarly in matters of language, and I don’t disagree with anything he’s said so far. However, I want to make a more radical statement. Perhaps Eugene agrees with it, but I want to express it more nakedly. There is no such thing as the English language. Every person speaks slightly […]

I’m trying to translate the following quote from D

I agree with most of Randy’s and Ilya’s comments on libertarianism and war. I’m just writing to silghtly disagree with Ilya about the nature of libertarianism. As Ilya writes, the idea that “nondefensive humanitarian military intervention is potentially compatible with libertarianism” may seem to be “a paradoxical claim,” but really isn’t paradoxical at all. It […]

Check out The Conglomerate (“The Glom” for the cool kids), where, as part of their Junior Scholars Workshop, today they’re commenting on my paper, Privatization and the Law and Economics of Political Advocacy (forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review). There are comments up by Tom Ulen, Paul Rubin, and Brian Galle. Comments on the paper […]

I posted a comment to Jonathan’s post below that I thought I’d promote to an actual post (with some slight changes). It’s about the recurring question whether there’s anything anti-Semitic about singling out Israel for criticism when, for anything bad that Israel arguably does, a ton of other countries (China, Sudan, etc.) do it worse. […]

Remember the Chinese-Albanian axis? Now not only are China and Egypt both suppressing free speech, but Chinese and Egyptian liberals are teaming up to fight them. See the Free the New Youth 4! web site, dedicated to the case of four students sentenced to 8-10 years in prison for running a discussion group. Now see […]