The Volokh Conspiracy Comes to Reason.

AuthorGillespie, Nick
PositionQ&A - Eugene Volokh - Interview

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.

A: There's a line that law is the only discipline in which the phrase "That's an original idea" is a pejorative. But in the academy, we're always supposed to be original, and what's more, it's more fun to be original. "OK," I thought, "so it can't be gang."

This was in 2002, not long after all this talk about the "vast right-wing conspiracy." So I thought, "How about The Volokh Conspiracy?" The absurd thing is that a conspiracy would call itself "The Conspiracy" on a webpage. I will say that since then I've heard people say, "Look, I'm reluctant to pass along your stories to my friends, because they're going to think that this is a conspiracy theory website." On the other hand, at times I remember looking in our referrer logs, and people were looking for conspiracy theories. They found our blog. They may have been disappointed, but maybe they got enlightened.

Q: You have a pretty fascinating...

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