Author Archive | Eugene Volokh

Interesting perspective on the Clark campaign: I can’t speak to its accuracy, but it struck me as worth reading.

Just wanted to thank again everyone who responded to the ancient Rome question that I posed a few months ago — I have all the responses (over 200 of them), and I will definitely go through them in several weeks, as soon as I get the Crime-Facilitating Speech piece (and a couple of the pieces […]

From the Chicago Sun-Times: Orland Park Muslim activist appeals his exile to high court (Thanks to Jim Maule for passing this along.)

From the Tampa Tribune: After moving to Florida from Pennsylvania this summer, [Krista] Abram, 16, spent her first few days attending Tarpon Springs High School bewildered by her peers’ and teachers’ ambivalence to the daily sight of Confederate battle flag images at the school’s north Pinellas County campus. Abram saw dozens of students wearing shirts, […]

when naming Benjamin: Tacking Jr. or II onto a boy’s name is too common, a new father decided, so the self-described engineering geek took a software approach to naming his newborn son. Jon Blake Cusack talked his wife, Jamie, into naming their son Jon Blake Cusack 2.0. Version 2.0 was born Tuesday . . . […]

From the Guardian (U.K.): Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attache at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC’s This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening. […]

Looking over that 1984 Heritage item with the Kristol homosexuality / free speech quote, I also saw this, from Midge Decter: [Question:] What explains the sudden prevalence of overt homosexuality? [Decter’s Answer:] One reason for so much homosexuality is the terror that angry, truculent girls and women have introduced into the relations between the sexes. […]

the chicken or the egg? People ask that as if it’s the quintessentially unanswerable question. But of course the answer is clear: The egg.      Why? Well, here’s the literal solution: There were eggs — for instance, dinosaur eggs — long before there were chickens. QED.      Enough of these lawyer tricks, Volokh, you say. Of course […]

For a great parody (whether deliberate or accidental) of hard-core Marxism, see Proculian Meditations. It has it all: Pejorative yet mysterious jargon — yes, even “running dog” makes an appearance, and our own Randy Barnett is described as a “crypto-anarchist, pseudo-libertarian” (so deep down inside he’s anarchist, but doesn’t admit it, yet he isn’t really […]

On How Appealing this morning. As blog readers might gather, I often disagree quite strenuously with Judge Reinhardt, but it’s very interesting to hear his perspective on things.

From the Borowitz Report: The Democratic Party ignored the triumph of Senator John Kerry (D-Mass) in the New Hampshire primary last night and instead handed the Democratic nomination for President to the movie blockbuster “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” The Democratic nomination brings the film?s total number of nominations to […]

The Framers, by the way, were apparently quite aware of the risk that bribes can undermine institutional decisionmaking, and saw the need to craft institutions in part to minimize the risk of such bribery. See, e.g., Federalist Nos. 22, 43, 57, 62, 66, 68, and 83. The analysis is instructive, I think, in deciding to […]

My quote earlier today of Irving Kristol’s argument that advocacy of homosexuality should be constitutionally unprotected led me to look up again his entire comment. Here is the material most relevant to the free speech question (again from Sex and God in American Politics; What Conservatives Really Think, Policy Review (Heritage), Summer 1984): [T]hose local […]

During the run-up to Gulf War II, many people argued that we shouldn’t go to war without multilateral support — support from a broad range of foreign countries, either directly or as translated into support from the Security Council.      There are, I think, three possible reasons for this position. One is purely pragmatic: if we […]

Dejafoo has the details, and a pointer. “Whereas the murder of Christ by the leadership of Israel formed the basis around which the religion of Christianity would be formed, now the murder of the descendants of those leaders at the hands of those professing to be Christians has supplanted what was the religion which helped […]