The Volokh Conspiracy Is Out To Get You—And Everyone in America

According to Tablet magazine:

Last week, when the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether religiously owned corporations like Hobby Lobby should be exempt from providing contraception coverage to their employees, the government’s reply brief cited dozens of cases and statutes—and one blog with a weird name, The Volokh Conspiracy.

It wasn’t the first time the site made itself heard before the nation’s highest court. In the wake of the passage, in 2010, of the Affordable Care Act—the cornerstone of President Obama’s domestic agenda—libertarian writers for The Volokh Conspiracy were instrumental in building the constitutional challenge to the law’s individual mandate. “When the Affordable Care Act was going through the legislative process, most law professors agreed that the ACA was constitutional,” said South Texas College of Law’s Josh Blackman, who wrote the definitive scholarly account of the challenge.

Then The Volokh Conspiracy entered the fray, and everything changed. “Usually these kinds of legal arguments develop over the course of many years in law reviews, in conferences and symposiums,” Blackman continued, “but this was on warp speed. You had blog posts on the day where you could actually see the arguments shaping before you.” Soon the challenge was being hotly debated among law professors and was adopted by state attorneys general across the United States. What the legal establishment once considered an open-and-shut laugher turned into a 5-4 Supreme Court nail-biter.

It was, perhaps, the first time that a highly technical legal debate on a matter of national policy importance—the sort of discussion usually confined to law reviews, academic panels, and conference rooms at the Justice Department—played out in real time for the consumption of lay readers as well as professionals, and it cemented the site’s role as a public clearinghouse for cutting-edge legal debate. As Paul Clement, the former U.S. solicitor general who represented the 26 states opposing Obamacare, put it, “The Constitution had its Federalist Papers, and the challenge to the Affordable Care Act had The Volokh Conspiracy.”

Founded as a solo operation in April 2002, the site is now one of the Internet’s most-read legal blogs, boasting a diverse readership of scholars and policymakers—as well as Supreme Court Justices—across the ideological spectrum. (Justice Elena Kagan has said she reads it daily.) In January, The Volokh Conspiracy moved to the Washington Post, giving it an even more prominent role in the national conversation—and more power to shape the discourse surrounding issues currently being decided in the courts, from religious freedom to gay marriage.

How did a center-right blog written by libertarian-leaning professors become the most influential in American legal circles? The story begins with its founder and namesake, a Soviet Jewish refugee named Eugene Volokh. . . .