Author Archive | Eugene Volokh

Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate argues thus: The reality is even more compelling: A Defense of Marriage Amendment would enshrine, for the first time, language of intolerance and exclusion in a document that was intended to set forth basic rights. Does President Bush really want to be remembered as the guy who first used the Constitution […]

Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, urges Bush to support a particular approach to gay marriage (which, I assume from her article, is “letting Massachusetts set its own rules and letting the courts chew over the whole mess for a few years”): There is a principled, moderate resolution to this issue, but he has thus far ignored […]

My friend Glen Whitman points to this post on The Language Log, which starts: Can’t anybody use a dictionary anymore? I enjoy a good curmudgeonly rant about how English is going to the dogs these days, I really do. But why can’t the journalists who crank out such screeds check their lexical prejudices against a […]

My colleague Steve Bainbridge writes: . . . I would like to see Bush turn the debate fully to the “who decides” question. Instead of talking about the sanctity of marriage (which heterosexuals like Britney Spears are doing a pretty good job of destroying without help), Bush should focus the debate on judicial activism. How […]

A bunch of people have forwarded to me versions of this news story: [S]ubpoenas were served last week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at [Drake University], ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said. . . . In addition to records about who attended the […]

Here’s the introduction to my brief quote on NPR’s Marketplace Jan. 26, 2004: Eugene Volokh teaches law at USUAL. It was said quite right on the air, if I recall correctly; the error was in the transcript. Something to keep in mind when one is thinking of relying on what purports to be a verbatim […]

Letter responding to my op-ed on judges and Congress: Mark Allenbaugh writes this letter to the L.A. Times: The eponymous premise of Prof. Eugene Volokh’s “Congress Has Every Right to Judge the Judges,” Feb. 8, 2004, at M3, is quite surprising, especially coming from a constitutional law professor. While Congress certainly does have a right […]

Ramesh Ponnuru defends a particular proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which reads: Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof […]

Is he the Chief Justice of the United States, or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? (The question was prompted by this How Appealing post and the BeldarBlog post to which it refers.) Readers familiar with my loosey-goosey views towards the language won’t be surprised that I say “both.” His generally accepted title is […]

A reader writes, apropos “Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name,” that animals do things that we wouldn’t tolerate in humans: They are animals and we are not. We don’t need to use them as a guide for how humans should act.      I agree with this entirely — which is why, for instance, Jerry Falwell […]

A New York Times piece on homosexuality among animals. The introduction reminds me of Opus’s talk of “penguin lust,” though I’m pretty sure that Opus himself is pretty straight, though occasionally interested in other species.      Of course, the article also mentions the bonobos, always good for some prurient appeal (“Female bonobos have been observed to […]

According to the Chicago Tribune (emphasis added), Several parents and their children filed a lawsuit Thursday in federal court, saying the children’s 1st Amendment rights were violated last year when they were not allowed to wear a T-shirt bearing the word “Gifties” at a Chicago public school. The controversy began during the 8th graders’ annual […]

I have a piece in today’s L.A. Times on the latest controversy; here’s a slightly changed version of that piece: Congress wants to know how federal judges are applying the law. It tells the Justice Department to provide certain reports. Unconstitutional!, federal district judge Dickran Tevrizian held earlier this month. The attempt by Congress to […]

Evolution of alphabets: Pretty cool. Thanks to GeekPress.

I thought I’d mention that Mirror of Justice, the blog coauthored by several Catholic law professors, is not the same as The Mirror of Justices, a late Middle Ages English legal work.      According to one source, The Mirror of Justices was once believed to be a Saxon-era work, but was in fact created between the […]