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All the recent praise of sous vide cooking (such as Megan McArdle’s) makes me inclined to buy one. Do any of you folks who have experimented with such machines have a sense of the relative merits of the various gadgets? I can’t decide between the Sous Vide Supreme ($400+), Sous Vide Demi ($300+), and the […]

A very interesting program, with, among others, Joan Biskupic (Reuters), Adam Liptak (New York Times), noted liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, and noted conservative lawyer Miguel Estrada. Moderator Rick Hasen (Election Law Blog) has more details.

On remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held today in Zivotofsky v. Secretary of State that the federal law requiring the U.S. State Department to list “Israel” as the country of birth in U.S. Passports for U.S. citizens born in Israel is unconstitutional because it “impermissibly […]

One of senior Conspirator Eugene Volokh’s cleverest inventions is the Reverse Mussolini Fallacy: The Mussolini Fallacy is believing that, because Mussolini made the trains run on time (if he did), that excuses his other acts. The Reverse Mussolini Fallacy is believing that, because Mussolini made the trains run on time, making the trains run on […]

This fall, I will be teaching the first year course on Property for the first time in a couple years. I would like to ask readers who are property professors, practitioners in the field, or otherwise expert on the subject if you have suggestions for recent cases and other materials that you think should be […]

In The New Republic, Noam Scheiber has a long article on recent internal dynamics inside Mayer Brown, the very prominent law firm. I’ve never worked at a big firm beyond the fantasy experience of being a summer associate back in the 1990s, so I can’t speak directly about whether the story is representative of other […]

Last week, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. As a municipality, Detroit filed under Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code. Shortly after Detroit filed, however, a state judge declared that Michigan’s Governor could not approve the filing (as required by Chapter 9) because doing so would violate the state of Michigan’s Constitution, which provides that […]

I regret that I overlooked my friend Richard Epstein’s thoughtful reply on Ricochet to my Wall Street Journal op-ed on the blanket seizures of data by the National Security Agency and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the constitutionality of which has apparently been authorized in secret opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Court: National […]

Volokh Conspiracy readers who are heading off to law school in the Fall might benefit from a short book on contract law I wrote recently as part of a series called, the Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law.  It is written to be accessible to students and to discuss most of the “classic” cases one is […]

A very interesting post by Rick Pildes.

Michelle Meyer has a great post at The Faculty Lounge. Among other things, for those who think that Zimmerman “routinely profiled black males and only reported black males to the police,” Meyer has some analysis of Zimmerman’s calls that at the very least complicate the story.

did not fund George Zimmerman’s defense. But please proceed with your Two Minutes Hate.

In response to my post yesterday, Corey Robin has a blog post on Crooked Timber based on a good faith, but uncharitable misreading of this prefatory sentence on my piece. I wish to add a few additional considerations that I have become aware of over the past several years as I have researched and written about “abolitionist […]

Seth Barrett Tillman writes in to add these points to our discussion of secession and the Confederacy. First, we do not have good evidence that even a majority of the adult white males in each rebel state supported secession at the time purported state conventions issued their ordinances of secession. The secession conventions were hardly […]