In December, the cast of characters known collectively as The Volokh Conspiracy left The Washington Post—where they have made their home since 2014—and moved to reason.com. Shortly before the eclectic crew of legal bloggers began their migration, the conspiracy’s namesake and unofficial ringleader, University of California, Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh, talked with Reason’s Nick Gillespie about life, liberty, and the law.
Q: The contributors to The Volokh Conspiracy are mostly libertarianish, but not exclusively so. Is that accurate?
A: That’s right. We’re basically moderates, libertarians, and conservatives. Some of us are more on one side than another, but I like “libertarianish.” That’s how I think of myself. For the purposes of our blog, we never feel we need to toe the party line. Sometimes I talk about court cases, and I point out that the legally correct result under the precedents, it’s not the libertarian result. We might like to have a Constitution that’s more libertarian than ours, but in many ways our Constitution is majoritarian rather than libertarian.
Q: Why “conspiracy”?
A: I was trying to come up with a name, and I thought, “How about The Volokh Gang?” Then I realized there was a show on television, a public affairs show, called The Capital Gang, and people would think that we are trying to rip them off, or at the very least that we’re derivative.
Q: And who wants that? Especially in law, where everything is based on what came before.
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