Draft:Alexander Volokh

Alexander "Sasha" Volokh
Known for	The Volokh Conspiracy
Academic background
Education	University of California, Los Angeles (BS) Harvard University (JD, PhD)
Academic work
Discipline	Law
Institutions	Emory University School of Law

Alexander "Sasha" Volokh is an American legal scholar and professor of law at Emory University School of Law. He is known for his scholarship in law and economics, privatization, antitrust, administrative law, and legal history, as well as for his contributions to the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy.

Early Life and Education

Volokh immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union with his family in 1975. Volokh's brother, Eugene Volokh, is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and founder of The Volokh Conspiracy.

Volokh earned his B.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Volokh then attended Harvard University, where he earned both his J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in economics.

Career

Following law school, Volokh served as a law clerk for the following jurists:

• Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States (2005 term)
• Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court of the United States

Before joining the Emory Law faculty in 2009, Volokh served as a visiting associate professor at Georgetown University Law Center and as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center. Volokh has also offered expert testimony in antitrust matters.

Scholarship

Volokh's academic work has been published in numerous law reviews including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Michigan Law Review, American Law and Economics Review, and International Review of Law and Economics, among others.

Volokh has also written for popular legal, policy, and news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Monthly, National Review, and Reason.

Notable Contributions

• Volokh's work has been cited by Supreme Court Justices, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who cited his Notre Dame Law Review article "The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine" in her concurrence in FCC v. Consumers' Research (2025). Justice Neil Gorsuch cited an amicus brief Volokh authored for the Reason Foundation in the same case.
• Volokh has filed amicus briefs in multiple courts, including briefs related to antitrust, state-action immunity doctrine, and First Amendment issues. Volokh authored an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit case Teladoc v. Texas Medical Board and co-signed an amicus brief with other antitrust professors in Visa Inc. v. Osborn.

The Volokh Conspiracy

Volokh is a co-founder and contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, one of the most cited legal blogs in the United States. The blog primarily covers legal and public policy issues, from a lens it describes as "generally libertarian, conservative, centrist, or some mixture of these." The blog was launched in April 2002 by Volokh's brother Eugene Volokh under the name The Volokh Brothers, with Sasha as a co-founder. The blog has since been hosted by The Washington Post (2014–2017) and subsequently by Reason.

Volokh has described the blog's political orientation, and his own, as broadly libertarian. Volokh's views were shaped in part by his family's experience emigrating from the Soviet Union. "Those of us who share that story share the same reason for why we became libertarian," Volokh explained in a 2014 interview, noting that firsthand exposure to unchecked state power naturally inclined Soviet émigrés toward skepticism of government.

Personal Life

Volokh lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife and three children. Volokh is a speaker of Esperanto and has submitted entried to Esperanto film festivals.

Selected Publications

Law Review Articles

• "n Guilty Men". University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 146 (1): 173–216. 1997.
• "A Tale of Two Systems: Cost, Quality, and Accountability in Private Prisons". Harvard Law Review. 115 (7): 1868–1891. 2002.
• "Choosing Interpretive Methods: A Positive Theory of Judges and Everyone Else". NYU Law Review. 83 (3): 769–846. 2008.
• "Privatization and the Law and Economics of Political Advocacy". Stanford Law Review. 60 (4): 1197–1253. 2008.
• "Property Rights and Contract Form in Medieval Europe". American Law and Economics Review. 11: 399–450. 2009. (peer-reviewed).
• "Prison Vouchers". University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 160 (3): 779–863. 2012.
• "Privatization and the Elusive Employee-Contractor Distinction". UC Davis Law Review. 46 (1): 133–208. 2012.
• "Prison Accountability and Performance Measures". Emory Law Journal. 63 (2): 339–416. 2014.
• "The New Private-Regulation Skepticism: Due Process, Non-Delegation, and Antitrust Challenges". Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. 37: 931–1007. 2014.
• "Judicial Non-Delegation, the Inherent-Powers Corollary, and Federal Common Law". Emory Law Journal. 66 (6): 1391–1459. 2017.
• "Medical Malpractice as Workers' Comp: Overcoming State Constitutional Barriers to Tort Reform". Emory Law Journal. 67 (5): 975–1042. 2018.
• "The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine". Notre Dame Law Review. 99 (1): 203–264. 2023.

Co-authored Works

• Juan Carlos Botero; Rafael La Porta; Florencio López-de-Silanes; Andrei Shleifer; Alexander Volokh. "Judicial Reform". The World Bank Research Observer. 18 (1): 61–88. 2003.
• Alex Kozinsky; Alexander Volokh. "The Appeal". Michigan Law Review. 103 (6): 1391–1400. 2005.

See Also

• Eugene Volokh
• Emory University School of Law
• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 8)
• The Volokh Conspiracy

External Links

• Faculty page at Emory Law
• Author page at Reason.com
• Author page at Reason Foundation
• The Volokh Conspiracy at Reason