Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

but House and Senate Republicans won’t play along.

on US News’s website (premium access required), Georgetown moves up to seventh, Fordham to sixteenth, BYU to 21st, U. Washington to 25th, GMU to 31st, Cardozo to 35th, Baylor to 36th, San Diego to 44th, Brooklyn to 46th, and Lewis and Clark to 47th. As I mentioned previously geographic desireability seems a significant factor in […]

of law schools are being posted and discussed all over the web. Biggest surprise: Boalt drops to thirteen. George Mason continues its climb, to 38. I’m sure Brian Leiter will have some choice words to say about the rankings, as usual. I’m not a huge fan of U.S. News’s methodology. As an example of why, […]

A few weeks ago, as part of a lecture on academic freedom at Emory University, I noted that censorious campus feminists have been the leading force behind campus speech restrictions masquerading as “hostile environment” rules, and stated the following:One does not need much of an imagination to come up with examples of how antidiscrimination law […]

Franz Kafka has a couple of nice short “stories” about the law. The most famous one, “Before the Law,” which I may post one day, is from the novel The Trial, which of course is all about the law; but here’s another one, called “The New Attorney.” We have a new attorney, Dr. Bucephalus. Little […]

lots of inane (but often victorious) lawsuits to make your blood boil at Overlawyered.com.

The controversy Eugene blogged about yesterday reminded me of one of the more outrageous such incidents, back in the late 1980s. UCLA suspended an editor of the student newspaper for running an editorial cartoon ridiculing affirmative action preferences. In the cartoon, a student asks a rooster on campus how it got into UCLA. The rooster […]

who has just been named the new Dean at Georgetown Law. Via Brian Leiter.

In summer 2002, I went to the Institute for Humane Studies‘ Social Change Workshop for grad students (and, as one of IHS’s graduate summer research fellows, I was a TA of sorts at the workshop, presenting a paper and running discussion sections). There’s going to be another one from June 19 to 25, and you […]

This post by Kieran at Crooked Timber on antitrust law and libertarianism leads to the following thoughts: The right way to look at antitrust law is not whether economic theory suggests that particular monopolies can and will exist that can, in theory, be corrected through government action, to the benefit of both consumer welfare and […]

Can a Western newspaper really publish a fawning obituary of Sheikh Yassin without mentioning a single one of his innocent victims? The Guardian can. Thanks to Scott Burgess for the pointer.

Ha’aretz reports: “Israel Defense Forces paratroopers caught a Palestinian boy, aged 12, wearing an explosive belt at the Hawara roadblock south of Nablus in the West Bank on Wednesday afternoon… The army believes that the boy was meant to detonate the belt near the soldiers or near the nearby army base.” This is not an […]

I’ve recently reread Plessy v. Ferguson, and I was struck by some very libertarian language in the opinion that is almost always edited out of it by casebook editors: It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race, but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and colored […]

USA Today Scandal Update: This Salon story about Kelley’s fabrications is headlined, “Bloodthirsty Arabs, Vigilante Jews,” but no bloodthirsty Arabs appearing in any of Kelley’s stories are actually noted by the author. Rather, the story talks about a fabricated Pakistani child who wants to blow up the World Trade Center (Pakistanis are not, of course, […]

On Daniel Pipes’ blog, I came across this ridiculous letter from Robert M. Berdahl, chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley, sent in response to a protest about the way the university handled disruptions of his talk there: February 26, 2004Dear xxxx:I would like to respond to your inquiry about the recent lecture of Daniel Pipes […]