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Professor and blogger Eugene Volokh |
Pundit prof gets new chair
BY ANNE BURKE
Today Staff Writer
“Can I call you back? I’m on the phone with The New York Times.”
Eugene Volokh sounded breathless. The UCLA law professor, a leading scholar on constitutional law, is one of the media’s go-to guys on the political right. Ever since the news broke about Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, his phone’s been ringing a lot. Volokh describes himself as a “libertarianish, moderate conservative,” and the gist of his remarks to the media is that President Bush’s nominee is a “very smart, thoughtful, judicious fellow.”
Volokh clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor but his popularity with the media probably has more to do with his blog, the Volokh Conspiracy (volokh.com), an influential law and public policy site on which Volokh and a dozen or so other legal minds ponder the big questions of the day.
Volokh started the blog 3-1/2 years ago but since Alito’s nomination, traffic at the site has been heavier than ever. “Yesterday (Oct. 31), we had 65,000 unique visitors, and that’s up from the 20,000 to 30,000 we’ve had over the last few weeks, which is up from 12,000 to 15,000 several months ago,” Volokh explained in his rapid-fire manner of speaking.
The remarkable thing about the Volokh Conspiracy’s popularity is that it’s full of serious — “substantive,” the professor corrected — musings about the law, with an occasional detour. Later in the month, Volokh will be in Washington, D.C., and he posted an invitation for readers to join him and his co-conspirators on a Friday evening at 8:30 p.m. for “generally pleased hour” cocktails, so-named because the group will have missed happy hour.
While it’s impossible for Volokh to know who all his readers are, he ventures that “the great majority are nonlawyers interested in hearing popularly accessible views on legal subjects.”
While Volokh’s been busy commenting on the national news, here at UCLA, he’s been making news of his own. On Oct. 28, the law school announced that Volokh was the first recipient of the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law. Volokh said he is a great admirer of Schwartz and feels especially honored to hold the chair. Schwartz taught at UCLA from 1969 until his death in 2001.
Aside from the fact that Volokh is a high-profile member of the national punditocracy, his appointment is interesting on two other counts. At 37, he’s relatively young for a chair. But then that’s the way it goes for a former child prodigy. He was 15 when he graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in math, and only 26 when he began teaching here.
It’s also worth noting that while the law faculty is overwhelmingly left-of-center, the professor who got the chair is a conservative. “It says, I think, that our faculty is one that values academic freedom and genuine intellectual diversity,” Volokh said.
Volokh notes that he does not shy away from controversy. He was legal adviser to the Proposition 209 campaign, the anti-affirmative action initiative passed by California voters in 1996.
Volokh’s on paternity leave this semester — he and his wife, Leslie, welcomed their second child six months ago — but returns in January to teach free speech law and criminal law. |
