Posted by Orin Kerr:
Eugene Volokh, Top 20 and Boy Genuis:
Eugene Volokh is one of the Top 20 Legal Thinkers in America! Or at
least, he's one of the Top 20 most prominent and respected legal
thinkers that blog readers know about. The rest of the results of the
Legal Affairs "poll" is available [1]here.
Eugene gets special billing in the poll results as a "Boy Wonder":
Richard Posner was once the guiding light for legal academics
charting a path to public intellectualism. His model: Augment a
stellar scholarly reputation with a second career as a judge or
lawyer; contribute regular commentary to places like The New York
Times and The New Republic; please the media with a strong opinion
on practically everything; and churn out a new book every six
months (or at least make it feel like every six months). The rapid
rise of Professor Eugene Volokh, however, suggests a new path. Not
yet 37, Volokh has become famous enough to appear on our list
despite never having written a general-interest book or taken a
high profile case to court.
Volokh, whose family emigrated from Kiev not long after his
seventh birthday, is undeniably prodigious. By age 15, he had a
B.S. from UCLA and was holding down a job as a computer programmer.
He returned to UCLA to complete law school, landed two coveted
clerkships�Ninth Circuit rabble-rouser Alex Kozinski followed by
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor�and then joined the faculty of his alma
mater. In a little over a decade, Volokh has produced a steady
stream of provocative law review articles, establishing his bona
fides in such disparate fields as gun control (which he vigorously
opposes), free speech (which he feels is being squeezed by sexual
harassment laws), and Yiddish (which he believes is "supplanting
Latin as the spice in American legal argot"). He has been a
visiting scholar at Stanford and Harvard and has literally written
the book on being successful at academic legal writing. According
to those who track such things, Professor Volokh has been cited by
his peers over 800 times, putting him in a league more or less of
his own.
Impressive stuff, but enough to place him ahead of old-timers
like Cass Sunstein, Ronald Dworkin, Larry Tribe, and Richard
Epstein? Probably not, save for the fact that Volokh is also the
founder of the eponymous Volokh Conspiracy, a blog launched in
2002. Not everything Volokh blogs about is strictly legal (posts
like "Black Russian Cake" and his tireless, and tiresome, crusade
against Slate's Bushisms come to mind), but in contrast to the
approach of Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, a fellow law professor
who is the USAToday of internet commentators, Professor Volokh
avoids writing on topics outside his expertise. His site is now
visited over 10,000 times per day. It's a pretty safe guess as to
who most of those visitors are: law professors, judges, lawyers,
and apparently our readers.
Thanks to [2]Howard for the link.
References
1. http://legalaffairs.org/poll/
2. http://legalaffairs.org/howappealing/041905.html#002055
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