The Volokh Conspiracies

I went down to NYU law school today to visit my friend Joseph Weiler —you are all coming to the Eramus Lecture he’s delivering on March 7th, aren’t you?

Anyway, while I was there I saw posters for a lecture this afternoon by Eugene Volokh on the structure of slippery-slope arguments. And I was caught up in a mill—or a scrum, maybe? anyway, a swirling crowd—of students and visitors and New York policeman.

Eugene Volokh rates this kind of action? Turns out that the mayor was on campus for another event, which was, so I was told, the cause of all the fracas. Or rumpus. But meanwhile, the posters for Volokh’s talk read, as I remember: “Founder of The Volokh Conspiracy blog and Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at UCLA.”

I wonder how the Schwartz family feels about that. Indeed, I wonder how UCLA law school feels. For that matter, I wonder how I feel. Since when has even a blog as interesting as the The Volokh Conspiracy trumped, for a law-school audience, a chair at a major law school and all the speaker’s academic publications?

A fascinating change in the culture of things.