Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

Over the last few days, I’ve been blogging (here and here) about calendrical differences and how that affects the calculation of the date of Easter. The good news is that these problems are going to diminish substantially pretty soon. Recall the Orthodox calendar, which is 13 days off from the Western calendar. The Orthodox calendar […]

Yesterday, I posted about the difference between the Gregorian calendar that we use in the West and the Julian calendar that’s still 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 (e.g. October 12) shows up 13 days later on the […]

Easter is this Sunday, March 31. But Orthodox Easter, celebrated by most branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church (including the Russian Orthodox Church) and some Oriental Orthodox churches, is May 5 this year, a full five weeks after Easter as celebrated by Western Christian churches. (As a footnote, you may listen to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter […]

I have some questions for Jonathan (or anyone else), along the lines of my previous comments on DOMA and federalism: 1. Suppose DOMA defined “channels” to mean “navigable-in-fact waterways, as well as all interstate and intrastate waters including (but not limited to) intrastate lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams), mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, […]

As Jonathan wrote earlier, the Supreme Court’s Wednesday decision in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center might portend big things for Auer deference. Jonathan’s already hit the high points, but I wanted to note what Scalia said about how deferential Auer deference really is. It turns out there’s disagreement in the literature over the strength […]

My new post is up on the Reason Foundation web site. (Earlier, I had posted there on the Supreme Court’s antitrust decision in FTC v. Phoebe Putney.) Here’s the beginning: In June 2010, the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers & Staff filed a petition to be certified as the exclusive bargaining representative of teachers at […]

My friend Marvin Ammori has a piece in Slate about Uber, Lyft, and SideCar, three new companies trying to provide competition to the taxicab market. Here’s what he has to say about the antitrust solution to taxicab monopolies: It might seem odd to call for a federal agency like the FTC to take action in […]

Yesterday and today, I attended two excellent talks in the Atlanta area — the free-market/libertarian scene in Atlanta is actually kind of booming these days, with FEE, AFF, GPPF and ATLOS having an active presence, as well as some interesting student organizations. Last night, Tom Palmer of Cato/Atlas came down to Kennesaw State University to […]

I just finished reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I loved. It turns out that both this and the last English novel I read, David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, both have Esperanto components to the plot, which was unexpected but not totally out of left field, since both books have to do, broadly […]

Soothsayer. Caesar! CAESAR. Ha! who calls? CASCA. Bid every noise be still: peace yet again! CAESAR. Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak; Caesar is turn’d to hear. Soothsayer. Beware the ides of March. CAESAR. What man is that? BRUTUS. […]

In honor of Pi Day (3/14), I’ll share a mnemonic for 167 digits of pi, which I developed with some friends in the mid-’90s. Many people know the common mnemonic: “How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the tough lectures involving quantum mechanics.” Count the number of letters in each word and stick […]

White smoke. Live video feed here. I’m predicting Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan. UPDATE: Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, who will be Francis? I guess he doesn’t have a number, then. UPDATE 2: Here’s Pope Francis’s Wikipedia entry. UPDATE 3: Man, Google News and the N.Y. Times don’t even have the pope’s name yet. Advantage: […]

David M. Perry writes in The Atlantic about How History Can Help Us Predict the Next Pope. I like his first point, “Voting is Medieval”: Voting is a quintessentially medieval activity. Sure, popular representations of the Middle Ages focus on kings and knights, princesses and peasants, but medieval people, especially in cities, loved to vote. […]

Since I’ve been spending time recently, in the wake of FTC v. Phoebe Putney, posting on the antitrust state action doctrine (see, e.g., here and here), here’s a student comment from a recent issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, called The Antitrust State Action Doctrine and State Licensing Boards, by Ingram Weber. Here’s […]