Welcome to Our New Coblogger, Irina Manta

I'm delighted to report that Irina Manta, Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Hofstra Law School, is joining our blog. Irina is the Founding Director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law at Hofstra, and she primarily specializes in intellectual property law, though she has written about criminal law and national security law as well. Back in the day, she clerked for Judge Morris Arnold on the Eighth Circuit. Even further back in the day, she was born in Romania, which raises our East European representation to a whopping five (Sasha, Ilya, Eugene K., and me being the other four). We much look forward to having her with us!

Comments

[a ab abc abcd abcde abcdef ahf]

This slav-ish fascination with origins is, uhmmm, fascinating.

[Eugene Volokh]

Oh, I'd be careful about suggesting that Romanians are Slavs ....

I should say that I'm not terribly interested about the countries from which people are descended. But the country of people's birth often is interesting (even if the people came from there when they were young) -- though in this instance, not much more than mildly so, since we Russkies on this blog don't blog much about Russia (or the Ukraine or other places to which we're connected by birth), and since I expect that Irina won't blog much about Romania, either.

[a ab abc abcd abcde abcdef ahf]

Oops! I guess my ignorance of traditional prejudices and stereotypes is showing. I read history and wonder, where exactly are the boundaries between Germans, Poles, Russians, and everybody in between and nearby. Does Scandinavia include Finland? Finnish history seems tied up more with Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia than Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, but they seem related to German, and then you throw in Hungary, Czech/Slovakia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and how did Switzerland evolve, and how did Latin turn into Italian, and on and on it goes, I confuse language and culture and nations and eventually make some dumb joke and piss off lawyers, which is really about the last profession anyone should joke about, whose billable hours could bankrupt me!

That's not even considering Asia and Africa and the New World, or religions.

So I ought to just shut up.

[Eugene Volokh]

Don't worry about it, of course, but Romanian is a Romance language, not a Slavic language, and while the ethnicities are doubtless mixed, my sense is that Romanians aren't generally seen as predominantly ethnically Slavic (whatever that means) or part of any occasionally arising pan-Slavic movements. They do share a general majority religion (Orthodox Christianity) with many Slavs, but again that too is complicated, because of course Slavic Poles, Czechs, and Croats are not mostly Orthodox, and Orthodox Greeks (and, if you count them, Armenians) are generally not Slavs.

[dew]

"Does Scandinavia include Finland?"
Maybe not a great example. Almost no one considers Finland part of Scandinavia.
Scandinavia = Denmark+Sweden+Norway.
"Nordic countries" adds in Iceland and Finland, plus some territories like Greenland.

[Kazinski]

It's about time we started getting some pro-Trump voices on this blog.

Wait, you say that she's not pro-Trump? Well then what's the point?

Can't we just have more Josh Blackman instead?

[ThePublius]

Any voice that dilutes Prof. Somin's contributions is welcome.