Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

based on Franz Kafka’s The Trial: As the police come to arrest Josef K. one morning in his apartment, Josef K. is having a bowl of Special K. (For an idea for a possible sequel to The Trial, see here. Former posts of mine related to Kafka are available here and here, and see especially […]

Anyone remember that show? (Perhaps watched it on Nickelodeon in the mid-1980s?) Harry Brighouse on Crooked Timber does. See also John Quiggin’s and Henry Farrell’s posts about Doctor Who. (See also my posts about Doctor Who here and here. Note, as I noted back then, that Dalek is a good rhyme for Volokh. Also, since […]

Here’s a neat feature of the online OED. (Alas! You can only connect if you or your institution has a subscription. So if you can’t get there, and if you don’t have the paper copy, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Well, for the online interface stuff I’m talking about, even the […]

In today’s Schulman v. Attorney General, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected a pre-election challenge to an initiative constitutional amendment that would overrule the court’s same-sex marriage decision. The Massachusetts Constitution bars initiatives from “revers[ing] … a judicial decision,” but the court unanimously (and in my view correctly) held that this applied to attempts to […]

The decision is here. Among other things, the court rejected the argument that the search was improper because it could have captured lawfully privileged confidential Congressional documents, as well as the unprivileged evidence of Jefferson’s bribe-taking. (I thought most of Rep. Jefferson’s claims were quite weak, but that this one was at least more plausible.) […]

My last post recounted the story of how I found usages of “absent,” in its “quasi-prepositional” (so says the OED — but why quasi?) sense of “without,” dating back to 1888, not the 1944 that the OED now reports. Well, if the OED has incomplete research on American legal usages, and I have good legal […]

Hi, Sasha here — good to be back, after a two-year hiatus. Note to all: If you look at my personal web page, it’s seriously (about a year and a half) out of date. I’m working on that. For my first new post, I’ll share a recent time-wasting activity of mine: coming up with “pre-dating” […]

I find it a bit odd that I’ve been blogging for the VC for almost a year but have not made it on to any publisher’s review copy lists. The VC has a “circulation” of over ten thousand readers a day, many of whom, judging by my email, are professors, attorneys, or law students. That’s […]

According to this Newsweek story, high-ranking Bush Administration officials, most prominently Cheney and Rumsfeld, have argued for stripping Americans suspected of aiding Al Qaeda of their rights and holding them indefinitely as “enemy combatants.” They have met with strong resistance from SURPRISE! John Ashcroft and others in the Justice Department, who both remember that the […]

to try to discourage the ridiculously excessive bar and bat mitvzah parties that have become the norm in many large cities, this story in the April 26 People Magazine (not online) should be it:She’s got the deejay blasting Beyonce and a computerized light show. She has nearly 100 friends crammed into Manhattan’s ritzy Bryant Park […]

Picking up on a theme expressed on the Volokh Conspiracy and elsewhere (and citing my You Can’t Say That!), John Leo notes the growing threat to freedom of speech from antidiscrimination legislation in Canada. (Via Instapundit) In particular, Canada, joining many of its provinces (and several European countries), is on the verge of making public […]

Boston Globe:The 70,000-member police force the US-led coalition has sought hard to promote collapsed in disarray in many parts of the country. Hundreds of police officers and members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps quit during the fighting, as barracks and police stations were taken over by militias. Many switched sides and fought US troops. […]

A federal judge has awarded back pay and damages for emotional distress to a Christian employee who objected to his employer’s policies requiring him to “respect and value” the differences of his gay colleagues. Specifically, Albert Buonanno objected to language in an AT&T Broadband employee handbook stating that “each person at AT&T Broadband is charged […]

An excellent piece on the dilemmas faced by a Jewish, democratic state in dealing with its minority population, and vice versa, by my GMU colleague Peter Berkowitz.

Matthew Yglesias is staying out of the D.C. housing market. After an abortive bid on one house, so am I. The market seems absolutely insane. Every economic analysis I’ve read (edit: not sponsored by the housing industry) suggests that housing prices in Northeastern markets are out of whack by every historical measure (compared to apartment […]