Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

In my article Prison Vouchers, I speculated on information problems for prisoners choosing prisons (and the analogous problems for school choice) and how those might be resolved (some paragraph breaks added): Convicted defendants may not know the actual quality of prisons, just as parents may not know the actual quality of schools. Does this argument […]

The 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies begins this Thursday on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. I’m moderating a legal history panel on Thursday at 1:30, in Bernhard 106, called Law as Culture: Secular Punishment and Divine Retribution in Medieval Ireland (Panel 90). Here are the paper titles: Beheading, Hanging, and Being […]

The Reason Foundation’s Annual Privatization Report 2013, which has been released in chunks over the last few months, is now all out. In the Criminal Justice and Corrections section, you’ll find my article on Minneci v. Pollard, a Supreme Court decision from last year on federal private prisons’ Bivens liability. Here’s an excerpt: Early in […]

We’re famous.

O.K., so many of you figured out that my claim, yesterday, that $1 = 1¢ is not actually true. And it was clear that you had to either (1) not square the dollar or cent symbol to begin with, in which case the “proof” wouldn’t be able to proceed, or (2) square them, but remember […]

Note: this is only useful to you if you use it in the right direction. $1 = 100¢ = (10¢) ^ 2 = ($0.10) ^ 2 = $0.01 = 1¢. How can you use this proof? Propose to your student loan creditor that your $10,000 loan is actually just 10,000¢ = $100. Their strategy would […]

Dear Harvard Law Review executive editors, Are you still enforcing the rule against unmatched “on the other hand”s, which Eugene discusses below? If so, please get rid of it; it’s stupid. I vaguely recall having tried to get rid of it in 2003, and I vaguely recall that I was unsuccessful. Sincerely, An executive editor […]

I enjoyed the quote from the end of the takings case that Eugene pointed to yesterday: Another judge might find the magistrate judge’s opinion or this opinion inexact in this or that particular of constitutional law. Nonetheless, this Ordinance is an unmistakable, abusive, and coercive misapplication of governmental power, perpetrated to cynically evade the Constitution. […]

I’m planning to read a history of the papacy this summer. I already own two: Nicolas Cheetham’s History of the Popes, and Roger Collins’s Keepers of the Keys of Heaven. (I also own a more general (and longer) history of Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.) Does anyone have recommendations as between […]

In the summer of 2010, while I was teaching in Germany, we ran into a Russian cultural center in Berlin (it was probably the Russisches Haus) and bought some kids’ books at their bookstore. One of them was Russian History, by Natal’ia Maiorova. I’ve finally finished reading it to my kids, so now I know […]

My Emory Law students, for their Follies 2013 show (the best I’ve seen in the four years I’ve been at Emory), have their own take on the Volokh Conspiracy.

My friend Greg Lipper suggests that some of you may be interested in this marriage equality event in D.C., Marriage Equality: What can we expect from the Supreme Court and beyond?. The panelists are: The Honorable John M. Ferren, Senior Judge, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, Moderator Paul M. Smith, Jenner & Block (counsel […]

My new post is up on the Reason Foundation web site. It’s about the Supreme Court’s decision last term in Filarsky v. Delia (decided almost exactly a year ago), which discussed whether a private attorney doing an internal-affairs investigation for a municipality was entitled to qualified immunity in an employee’s § 1983 lawsuit. Here’s an […]

As background, see my posts about Easter and Christian calendars (first, second, third, and fourth). Recall that Easter is defined as the Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox. The spring equinox could happen on March 19, 20, or 21, but for Easter-calculation purposes, we define the spring equinox as March 21. Why […]

On Thursday, I posted about the difference between the Gregorian calendar (used by the Western churches) and the Julian calendar (used by most Eastern Orthodox churches). There’s a 13-day difference between them for the period between 1900 and 2100, so any given day shows up 13 days later on the Julian calendar than on the […]