Alexander "Sasha" Volokh is an Assistant Professor at Emory Law School. He earned his B.S. (1993) from UCLA, and his J.D. (2003) and Ph.D. in economics (2004) from Harvard University. He clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit (2004-05), and for Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Samuel Alito (2005-06). Before joining the Emory faculty, he was a Visiting Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center (2006-08) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Houston Law Center (2008-09). His interests include law and economics, administrative law and the regulatory process, environmental law and policy, and legal history. His current research topics include the private management of government services, medieval law, judicial decisionmaking, and statutory interpretation.
Articles in Student-Edited Law Reviews
Choosing Interpretive Methods: A Positive Theory of Judges and Everyone Else, NYU Law Review (2008)
In this Article, I propose a theory of how rational, ideologically motivated judges might choose...
Privatization and the Law and Economics of Political Advocacy, Stanford Law Review (2008)
A common argument against privatization is that private providers will self-interestedly lobby to increase the...
The Appeal (with Alex Kozinski), Michigan Law Review (2005)
The late Josef K., a thirty-something male, claims that “someone must have slandered [him], for...
The Pitfalls of the Environmental Right to Know, Utah Law Review (2002)
Would you want your family to live near a plant containing acetone, acetaldehyde, methyl butyrate,...
A Brief Guide to School-Violence Prevention, Journal of Law & Family Studies (2000)
Students shouldn’t shoot one another. So far, everyone seems to agree. Everyone also seems to...
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
Privatization, Free Riding, and Industry-Expanding Lobbying, forthcoming, International Review of Law & Economics (2009)
Critics of privatization have argued that privatization distorts the political system by giving private contractors...
Property Rights and Contract Form in Medieval Europe, forthcoming, American Law & Economics Review (2009)
This article contributes not only to to the literature on medieval economic history but also...
Judicial Reform (with Juan Carlos Botero, Rafael La Porta, Florencio López-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer), World Bank Research Observer (2003)
Working Papers & Works in Progress
Prison Vouchers, Draft 5 (2009)
School vouchers have been proposed as a way of bypassing the political pathologies of school...
Cases and Materials on Privatization, Version 3.3 (2009)
Why Do Judges Read Statutes?, Draft, Nov. 6 (2009)
The standard view that "statutory interpretation matters" -- that different methods can "lead to" different...
Privatization and the Effectiveness of Monitoring Agencies, Georgetown Law and Economics Research Paper No. 982146 (2007)
Contributions to Books
Externalities, Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (2008)
Better That Ten Guilty Men..., Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2006)
Student Writing
Civil Procedure—Class Actions—Seventh Circuit Reverses Lower Court's Approval of Class Action Settlement, Citing Evidence of Collusion.—Reynolds v. Beneficial National Bank, 288 F.3d 377 (7th Cir. 2002), Harvard Law Review (2003)
Class actions have the potential to increase the efficiency of litigation by eliminating duplicative lawsuits...
The Supreme Court, 2001 Term—Leading Cases: Takings Clause—Regulatory Takings—Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 122 S. Ct. 1465 (2002), Harvard Law Review (2002)
In 1922, Justice Holmes invented regulatory takings jurisprudence by announcing that “if regulation goes too...
Developments in the Law—The Law of Prisons: III. A Tale of Two Systems: Cost, Quality, and Accountability in Private Prisons, Harvard Law Review (2002)
Private prisons are on the rise. Privately operated juvenile facilities—mostly community-based group homes or halfway...