Money and Speech: Eugene Volokh

At he does masterfully and consistently, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh points out that while  money doesn’t equal speech, restrictions on it certainly curtail it as do money restrictions on other constitutional rights:

“People continue to characterize the Court’s campaign finance decisions as resting on the theory thatmoney is speech. And of course money isn’t speech.

But, as I wrote a few years ago, money isn’t abortion, either. Nonetheless, a law that banned the spending of money on abortion would surely be a serious restriction on abortion rights (whether or not you think that the Court was right to recognize such rights). A law that capped the spending of money for abortions at a small amount, far smaller than abortions often cost, would likewise be a burden on abortion rights, and dismissing this argument as “it is quite wrong to equate money and abortion” would be unsound.”

An Interview with the Boy Genius: First Amendment Stud Eugene Volokh

Bitter Lawyer has a fascinating interview with Volokh Conspiracy founder Eugene Volokh. I have visited Eugene’s blog since it’s early years. It was one of the first and is still the best. Then, recently, I saw a photo of Eugene and wondered how anyone this young could have had his years of prolific legal scholarship and practice experience. So I read up on him and discovered his family emigrated from the then-Soviet Union when he was only 10, and that he entered UCLA at the tender age of 12, and graduated at 16.  UCLAl not being apparently  challenging enough for this cute boy genius, he also worked as a computer programmer for the likes of HP. The interview is great, and has a lot of useful stuff for you law students out there.