The Volokh Conspiracy
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R Street Institute Event with Two Ilyas - Speaking About Our Respective Books
Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute and I will be speaking about our respective new books: "Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom," and "Supreme Disorder: The Politics of America's Highest Court."
On October 28, 1-2:30 PM EDT (approximate end time), the R Street Institute will host an online event entitled "Between Two Ilyas: Judicial Nominations, Immigration, and Voting with Your Feet." It features not one, but two Ilyas: Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute, and myself. We will each be speaking about our respective new books: Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration and Political Freedom, and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court. As the event description puts it, "Both works grapple extensively with issues of constitutional structure, and both examine the value of limiting and decentralizing political power. These issues could not be timelier…."
The event is free and open to the public, and you can register to watch here.
To avoid exacerbating the problem of #IlyaConfusion, potential attendees may want to read my definitive guide to how to tell the two Ilyas apart! For further disambiguation, you can watch this 2016 debate in which we crossed swords on the subject of presidential power over immigration.
The #IlyaConfusion problem has, at times, gotten so bad that federal judges and prominent reporters have fallen into the trap. Shapiro's employer (the Cato Institute) once mistakenly attributed some speeches he had given to me, and people have been known to confuse my wife Alison with his wife Kristin, even though the two of them don't actually look all that much alike.
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That debate does not end with the promised juggling act. I am disappoint.
Seems to me you guys could easily remedy this problem by making sure one of you has a small black goatee. Works in all the evil twin plots.
You mean Ilya and a convenient body double.
Wait, which one are you again? Are you the one that was on the national constitution center podcast some weeks ago, or is that the other guy?
I'm never going to get this straight. Maybe call one of you guys "The Main Ilya" while calling the other "The Other Ilya". The most successful and well-known should be the main one.
That looks workable in the medium term, but may get confusing or even indeterminate as the Ilyas' relative fame and prosperity wax and wane. I suggest instead the time-honored use of attributes which are objective, absolute rather than comparative, and generally immutable over a lifetime. If the shoes fit and both were agreeable, for example, one might become Ilya the Great, the other Ilya the Terrible.