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
Everything We Know About Faith-Based Prisons, University of Alabama Law Review (2011)
This Article examines everything we know about the effectiveness of faith-based prisons, which is not...
Prison Vouchers, University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2011)
School vouchers have been proposed as a way to bypass the political pathologies of school...
Rationality or Rationalism? The Positive and Normative Flaws of Cost-Benefit Analysis, Houston Law Review (2011)
Environmental, health, and safety advocates, say Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore, have been wrongly hostile...
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...
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
Privatization, Free Riding, and Industry-Expanding Lobbying, International Review of Law & Economics (2010)
Critics of privatization argue that privatization encourages providers to lobby for industry expansion. I argue...
Property Rights and Contract Form in Medieval Europe, 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)
A review of the evidence on judicial reform across countries shows that those seeking to...
Working Papers & Works in Progress
The Constitutional Possibilities of Prison Vouchers, Draft 52 (2010)
Faith-based prisons, as currently constituted, are unconstitutional. Whether the funding mechanism is direct or indirect,...
Why Do Judges Read Statutes?, Draft, January 21 (2010)
The standard view that "statutory interpretation matters" -- that different methods can "lead to" different...
Cases and Materials on Privatization, Version 3.3 (2009)
These are the materials for my course on privatization, and the draft for an eventual...
Privatization and the Effectiveness of Monitoring Agencies, Georgetown Law and Economics Research Paper No. 982146 (2007)
The privatization literature depicts the choice whether to contract out as a tradeoff between excessive...
Contributions to Books
Externalities, Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (2008)
Entry on "externalities" for the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism.
Better That Ten Guilty Men..., Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2006)
Abridgment of the law review article "n guilty men," 146 U. Pa. L. Rev. 173...
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...
Popular Press
Cult of Capitalism Deserves More Than Ginn's Short Shrift, Harvard Law Record (2001)
Response to the Harvard Law Record column by Cliff Ginn available at http://www.hlrecord.org/news/341145.html.