Eugene Volokh, Who Graduated From UCLA At Age 15, Is Retiring From UCLA At Age 56 To Join The Hoover Institution

Eugene Volokh (UCLA; Google Scholar), My Move to the Hoover Institution:

Next year, I'll become a Professor of Law Emeritus at UCLA School of Law, after 30 years of teaching, and move (effective July 1, 2024) to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where I'll be a Senior Fellow—essentially like a permanent, tenured research faculty position, but with no teaching obligations.

Technically, I'll be "retiring" from UCLA. But at the ripe old age of 56, I will not be at all retiring from scholarship—I'll just be doing the same sort of research, public commentary (of course, including blogging), and occasional litigation as I have been doing at UCLA, but with more institutional support. Until June 30, 2024, I will be a Visiting Fellow at Hoover, while I finish my full-time obligations to UCLA.

I will continue to have complete academic freedom and security of employment (provided for expressly by the Hoover faculty contract, the same way as it is by Stanford for its tenured faculty members). As to this blog, this of course also means continued editorial independence, which I care about very much.

I expect I'll probably feel pretty much at home ideologically at Hoover, which is on balance an institution of the center-right. Naturally, I'm sure that there will be much my colleagues and I will disagree on, as there of course has been at UCLA—but that is the nature of a healthy academic institution. (For whatever it's worth, my sense is that the median ideological views at Hoover are much closer to the median American voter than are the median ideological views at the median top 20 U.S. law school.)

Hoover Institution Press Release, Prominent Legal Scholar Eugene Volokh Joins the Hoover Institution:

Eugene Volokh, one of America’s leading scholars of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and law and technology, will be joining the Hoover Institution full time following an illustrious thirty-year career at the UCLA School of Law.

Volokh’s appointment as a Hoover Institution visiting fellow became effective September 1. On July 1, 2024, Volokh, 56, will become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He will also continue his affiliation with UCLA as distinguished professor of law emeritus.

“Eugene Volokh is a scholar of the highest caliber," said Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice. "His singular research and insights on the intersection of technology and constitutional law shed light on fundamental issues shaping democratic life in America today. The Institution will benefit greatly from his unique ability to impact debates, from the US Supreme Court to the internet and the classroom."

“I’m delighted to move up to Hoover, which has long been one of America’s foremost policy research centers,” Volokh said. “I look forward to continuing my research and my public commentary, but with the matchless support that Hoover can provide.”

HeinOnline’s ScholarRank places Volokh among the top thirty of the most cited legal authors in court opinions and law journal articles over the last five years (Hoover’s senior fellows Michael McConnell and Richard Epstein are also in the same group). He is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (7th ed., 2020) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed., 2016), as well as more than one hundred law journal articles. Volokh’s work has been cited over three hundred times in judicial opinions, and in over five thousand law journal articles.

Volokh’s influential articles include, among many others:

• “Freedom of Speech and Information Privacy: The Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking about You” (Stanford Law Review, 2000)
• “The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope” (Harvard Law Review, 2003)
• “Freedom of Speech and Injunctions in Intellectual Property Cases” (Duke Law Journal, 1998; cowritten with Stanford’s Mark A. Lemley)
• “Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for Self-Defense: An Analytical Framework and a Research Agenda” (UCLA Law Review, 2009)

Much of Volokh’s recent work has dealt with law and technology, including social media platforms (e.g., “Treating Social Media Platforms Like Common Carriers?,” Journal of Free Speech Law, 2021), artificial intelligence (e.g., “Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output,” Journal of Free Speech Law, 2023), and virtual reality (e.g., “Law, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2018; cowritten with Mark A. Lemley).

Volokh is also an experienced appellate lawyer: he has argued more than thirty-five appellate cases since 2013 in state and federal courts and has filed over two hundred appellate briefs.

And Volokh is well known for being a pioneer in internet media, as the founder and coauthor of the prominent legal academic blog The Volokh Conspiracy, established in 2002. The Volokh Conspiracy operated as an independent blog from 2002 to 2014, was hosted by the Washington Post from 2014 to 2017, and since 2017 has been hosted by the magazine Reason.

Volokh worked as a computer programmer for twelve years before going into law teaching. He clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the US Supreme Court.

Update:  Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee), Big Loss for UCLA Law:

I can’t imagine doing that, but my institution is more supportive of me than UCLA has been of Eugene lately. This can only be viewed as a defeat for new dean Michael Waterstone, though it reflects more poorly on his predecessors.