Althouse: "Here’s my perfect blog post. There’s a story in the news. People are interested. I know something other people don't..."

April 3, 2015

"Here’s my perfect blog post. There’s a story in the news. People are interested. I know something other people don't..."

"... about this general area of law, and I can say it in a few paragraphs that I can just whip out. When a reader says, 'Huh, I hadn’t ever thought about that. I hadn’t seen this precedent. I hadn’t been aware of that legal doctrine. I hadn’t realized how this analogy would fit,' that makes me feel that I’ve done what I became an academic to do, which is to spread ideas."

Says Eugene Volokh, quoted in "Right Side of the Law: Eugene Volokh’s Global Influence/The wunderkind-turned-law professor is that L.A. anomaly: an influential conservative blogger."

The "wunderkind" part includes having his IQ tested at 206 when he was 12 and
— his words — "socially inept" and "goofy," about which he says: "Kids who fit my profile have a difficult adolescence even in a normal junior high school and high school."

IN THE COMMENTS: Unknown says he thought that quote in the post title was about me, but it's clearly not my idea of the perfect blog post for myself. It's something I do sometimes, but it's not what I like to do or hope to do and it's not at all the energy behind this blog. The classic example of what I'm trying to do with this blog is the 2005 post "Tattoos remind you of death." I don't need a tattoo saying "'Tattoos remind you of death' reminds you how to blog" to remember that.

19 comments:

Unknown said...: I thought the quotation was about you.; 4/3/15, 7:04 AM
Anonymous said...: Reading Eugene's stuff, I always recognize he's at least 1 SD to the right of me on the IQ curve, and I'm out to the right a bit as well.

The guy is amazing on so many topics.; 4/3/15, 7:10 AM
Michael K said...: "hard-right political circles."

That tells you about the source but it seems a fair piece. I wish my daughter could have had him as a professor but her suite-mate got her spot at UCLA because she was Hispanic. Lower grades and LSAT, of course, but Hispanic.

She went to a different law school and is a lefty.; 4/3/15, 7:22 AM
traditionalguy said...: That was very encouraging to read first thing in the morning. Eugene is what we need more of: "He is more pragmatic, less dogmatic and certainly less partisan and less likely to favor something just because others of his political leanings supported it. He believes in debate and discussion. He never gets personal. He never gets angry."

Sounds like a normal guy who uses his brains to think about things from many points of view. And it said his brother Sasha co-founded the Blog and is a Law Professor at Emory.; 4/3/15, 7:27 AM
rhhardin said...: He's so smart that it's hard to be helpful in the comment section.; 4/3/15, 7:33 AM
Wilbur said...: His blog is well-worth visiting regularly. It seems there's more law featured there than Ms. Altouse's blog, but I like that.; 4/3/15, 7:36 AM
Henry said...: The most amazing thing about Mr. Volokh isn't his IQ. It's his grace.; 4/3/15, 7:36 AM
MadisonMan said...: You'd think the article would link.; 4/3/15, 7:39 AM
Virgil Hilts said...: Henry said it perfectly.; 4/3/15, 8:05 AM
Mick said...: Volokh is a fraud. Another "lawyer" who doesn't know what a natural born Citizen is. Then the so called "Free Speech" proponent banned me.

See "The Greatest Blog Post comment ever" thread--- over 1200 comments, talking about nbC. Plenty of .Gov trolls there spreading disinfo.

Now he runs his blog in affiliation with the Washington Post (giiggle), the MSNBC of Newspapers, and writes for the HuffPO (guffaw). That he is affiliated with HP and WP means he has no credibility whatsoever.
Besides that he is an arrogant blowhard, much like the rest of the Far Left ilk.; 4/3/15, 8:29 AM
JCCamp said...: The VC itself is usually great reading, but the comments are awful, vituperative and disinclined to be about the substance of the law or the post. I'm not sure I seen many other blogs where those commenting hate the bloggers so.
Plus, of course, the WaPo.; 4/3/15, 8:31 AM
JCCamp said...: Oh, see preceding. Perfect timing.; 4/3/15, 8:32 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: I first met EV over 20 years ago on the Cyberia-L listserve. This was an email list that discussed cyber (computer) law, and attracted some of the hot young law profs. Shortly thereafter, another denizen of that list, Mark Lemley, and I both moved to Austin, Lemley to teach at UT law school, and me to work for a corporation. Lemley put on a series of great cyber law (and then patent law) conferences while there, and I got to speak a time or two. But, even when I wasn't (because these guys were really, really smart), I had the timing down so I could meet the speakers right after they came out of the speakers dinner, so I could join them on their trip down to E. 6th street. And, one of the cyber law regular speakers was EV. Looking back, he wasn't that much older at the time than many of the kids that we saw out on the town. I remember one night, with a half dozen or so of us, with him in his leather jacket, and some hippi-type got off the floor of one diver, pulled up my sport coat, apparently to see if I was armed (and therefore a narc).

I can blame EV for many many hours wasted blogging. One day, some 20 or so years ago, he chided me on my incivility in some discussion on Cyberia-L. He was, of course, correct - I had gotten heated, and have tried to remember that to this day, that you win more arguments with sugar than with acid. He had a link to his new blog in his .sig at the bottom of his post, I followed that back to the nascent Volokh Conspiracy, and the rest was downhill from there for me, in terms of blogging.

Yes, Volokh is usually the smartest guy in the room, and, yes, it is great seeing him cited in Supreme Court decisions, but the thing that sticks out the most in my mind is his kindness and insistence on civility. And, indeed, one of the reasons for the success of his blog is just that - that he has been able to make sure that the discussions there are usually very civil. Much more civil than the legal discussions you run into on many of the left leaning law blogs.; 4/3/15, 9:25 AM
wildswan said...: Blogging My Tattoo

Anarchy forever
Nihilism never

Under the law?
Over the law?
After the law?

Never the law?

Ever the law
but later
Period?

I just look out the window and see
The philosophy, the fashion,
The cat.
I/They
play tennis
with helium balloons.
And how.; 4/3/15, 9:27 AM
Birches said...: There are other law blogs that are aggregators or play it straight journalistically, but other than that, there’s almost no competition

Do you feel slighted?; 4/3/15, 9:28 AM
Sebastian said...: "hard-right political circles"

That caught my eye as well. Says a lot about the Left. Anything to their right is "conservative," anything right of center is "hard right."

Of course, Volokh also is "pragmatic" and "less dogmatic." That's about as much praise as any conservative can expect, and V. isn't even that conservative.

I like him, but being gracefully fair even in debating those who are ruthlessly unfair can turn into a kind of unfairness of its own.; 4/3/15, 9:31 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: I think that EV being considered conservative rests primarily on two things. First, he does have some relatively conservative conspirators on his blog. And, then, he was one of the key legal minds behind the 2nd Amdt. Renaissance. His story there, I think, was that he went into it with a fairly open mind, but tending towards the group rights point of view. But, the original sources strongly pointed towards the amendment protecting an individual right.; 4/3/15, 9:43 AM
rhhardin said...: I get more from Epstein, who must be awfully smart on some scale, but I'm not looking to be a lawyer but to understand why things are going wrong.

Epstein in writing isn't particularly good, but his podcasts and speeches are amazing.

I think he follows some bad composition rules in print, for instance the concluding moral that the WSJ always insists on at the end.

You don't want a moral, you want a bunch of principles and applications.; 4/3/15, 9:44 AM
Calvinus said...: I had Volokh as a professor at UCLA. I was eager to finally take a class from a "conservative" prof. One of things I discovered was that he was just as hard, if not harder, on the right-of-center students. I don't know if he was trying extra-hard to be fair or if he was trying to better sharpen our conservative arguments, but either way, I respected it. Some of the best liberal profs I had did the same thing with liberal students, but a lot didn't.; 4/3/15, 11:11 AM