Have Zoom, Won't Need to Travel

As I mentioned a few months ago, several groups have invited me to give Zoom talks this Fall, and I enthusiastically accepted. It's less engaging, of course, than an in-person talk, but there's no travel time and no travel cost, so I'm much more open to such invitations than I had been to in-person speaking engagements.

So far, I've done talks for law school groups, college classes, and lifelong learning groups; I've done podcasts and videocasts and webinars; I have some scheduled with bar associations; I'm arranging something with a church group; all of it is fun for me, and my sense is that it's interesting for the audiences as well.

And this reminded me that I wanted to offer this more broadly: If you have a group of any sort, such as

• your junior high or high school students,
• students in your home-schooling group,
• your college or law school classmates,
• your lawyer group,
• your nonlawyer group,
• your podcast or video audience, or
• who knows what else,

and you wanted me to give a Zoom talk about

1. free speech,
2. religious freedom,
3. gun rights and gun policy,
4. the Supreme Court,
5. the Constitution generally, or
6. maybe even some other topics,

just e-mail me at volokh at law.ucla.edu and let me know the circumstances.

Naturally, I'd prefer talking to larger groups rather than very small groups (though that might be easier to do via video, if you gather audience members from various different locations); and the sensible topics might differ from audience to audience. But I'm flexible.

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Post YouTube lecture videos. Revise them yearly to address comments. Travel is wasteful, dangerous, and stupid. Zoom will become stupid too.

[BadLib]

Awesome.

I hope some high school teachers take Professor Volokh up on this offer. This seem especially valuable if a enough Q&A is included so students who have inaccurate notions about the topic can benefit from having those gently challenged or countered as appropriate by an expert with such an even and accessible demeanor and impressive credentials.

Unfortunately I suspect most teachers who would engage the professor probably already would agree with many of his positions and are teaching, perhaps just under the radar, those concepts so there may be some redundancy. Still, an outside expert such as Professor Volokh could help the students grok the concepts (esp. with Q&A).

However, I would imagine that most public (and probably private) schools require administrator approval of outside speakers, esp. when multiple classrooms are exposed to them, so that could throw a wrench in this concept.

[Drechsler]

We are still having at least 2-3 Zoom talks per month. Despite the fact that on campus classes were renewed 4 weeks ago. My students enjoy those webinars and ask even more questions when they are online - they are too shy to speak up in class.

Rolf Drechsler -> Writtle University College assignments https://cheapessaywriter.co.uk/