Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

Sir — A recent issue of The Economist reports that the Russian government may aggressively privatize in Putin’s new term: IN THE 1990s privatisation in Russia was meant to be a way to wipe clean the vestiges of the Soviet economy and to create a new class of property owners. It had some success but, […]

The papal retirement news has proven that Latin is not totally useless: a Vatican reporter heard the news in Latin first and got the scoop. Similarly, back when the current Pope was elected, I was watching the announcement on TV and understood about a minute or two before everybody else who the new Pope was […]

Last week, I announced the Emory Law Journal’s Thrower Symposium on privatization. The symposium was a big success, and video is now available. Here’s the panel with my own presentation; my remarks start around 27:24 and run until around 41:09. In addition, I have various remarks in the Q&A immediately following my presentation.

I’ve just been teaching my law and economics class about mixed strategies in game theory, and I thought I’d share. This will be totally old hat to those who know anything about game theory, but hey, mixed strategies are fun. The game is the stag hunt, once described by Rousseau. We have two hunters, who […]

Today’s Thrower Symposium on privatization at Emory Law School, featuring a keynote address by Judge Kozinski and myself on one of the panels, was a great success. One benefit was seeing Jon Michaels of UCLA Law, whose work on privatization is always worth reading. Here’s his latest paper, Privatization’s Progeny, forthcoming in the Georgetown Law […]

You might want to check out a new article by Dru Stevenson at South Texas Law called Costs of Codification. Dru writes the Privatization Blog — don’t confuse it with the Reason Foundation’s Privatization Blog; I think either Dru or Reason should choose a catchier blog name. Here’s the abstract to Dru’s article, from SSRN […]

This Thursday, Emory Law School and the Emory Law Journal are holding the 2013 Randolph W. Thrower Symposium. This year’s topic is Privatization: Managing Liability and Reassessing Practices in Local & International Contexts. The keynote speaker is the judge I clerked for in 2004-05, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit. Here’s the blurb: […]

This is all over the medieval interwebs, but for those of you who haven’t been following: Archaeologists have found the skeleton of Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester, England, England. Richard III was killed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field which ended the Wars of the Roses, making him the last […]

My presentation in Montgomery, at the Thomas Goode Jones Law School at Faulkner University, on law and economics, was a big success. Here’s the video for those who are interested.

I thought I’d plug the summer seminars of the Foundation for Economic Education, one of the long-time U.S. free-market think tanks which is now moving down from its traditional digs in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. to Atlanta, where I live. FEE has three-day seminars for both high-school and college students. The high-school student seminars are: Anything Peaceful […]

All those in the Montgomery, Alabama area — I’ll be speaking at Thomas Goode Jones law school (Faulkner University) in Montgomery tomorrow, January 31, at 11:30 a.m. in Room 114. The topic is a popular talk of mine: Is Law and Economics a Right-Wing Plot? (Poster at this link.)

My paper, Privatization and the Elusive Employee-Contractor Distinction, which I serial-blogged here some time ago (here are the links for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6) has now been published in the UC Davis Law Review. Thanks, commentariat, for your comments. Commenter “yankee” is cited at footnote 232, […]

Via my friend Reid Atcheson, I find the following “funny” (for some definition of “funny”) proof of the irrationality of the cube root of 2. First, “recall” the standard proof of the irrationality of any root of 2. Take, for instance, the square root of 2. For purposes of contradiction, assume that the square root […]

This is the fourth and last in a series of posts serial-blogging a draft chapter I’ve written on privatization and competition policy (including antitrust) for a forthcoming Stanford University Press book on Competition and the Role of the State. Here’s the first part, here’s the second part, and here’s the third part. What follows represents […]

This is the third in a series of posts serial-blogging a draft chapter I’ve written on privatization and competition policy (including antitrust) for a forthcoming Stanford University Press book on Competition and the Role of the State. Here’s the first part, and here’s the second part. What follows represents the current draft, though sans footnotes […]