Hiring a Research Fellow in Free Speech Law for 1 or 2 Years, at the Hoover Institution (Stanford)

One week left to apply.

This was announced back in August, but I thought I'd pass it along again; if you're interested, please apply, and if you know people who might be interested, please pass this along to them.

Opportunity for Post-JD Scholars

The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is seeking an outstanding early-career legal scholar interested in researching free speech law, in preparation for seeking an academic position at a law school or elsewhere.

If selected, you would work on your own research with the guidance and supervision of Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh, who has moved to Hoover after 30 years as a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. You would be appointed a Research Fellow with the Center for Free Expression, for one year from July 2025 through June 2026. The term may be renewed, if both you and Hoover agree, for one extra year. You would be expected to be physically present at the Institution, working full-time, with no competing major professional commitments.

There is no teaching obligation, so you would have maximum time to research and write. However, you would be expected to help organize and participate in occasional conferences, workshops, and lectures, and to work on occasional projects with Volokh or other Senior Fellows. These tasks would all be related to free speech law and are expected to help promote your own research and future career.

Eligibility Criteria:

• You must have a JD or its equivalent by June 2025.
• You must commit to staying for at least one year (July 2025 through June 2026). The date range might be moved back slightly if required because of a judicial clerkship that will keep you occupied until July to September 2025.
• A judicial clerkship (past or upcoming) is not required, though it is a plus.
• Work experience as a lawyer is not required, though some such experience is a plus.
• A PhD in another discipline is not required, though neither is it frowned upon.
• You must have written a publishable law journal article already while in law school or shortly after. Whether it has already been published or not does not matter, so long as it is essentially complete. That article need not have been on free speech law.
• You must be planning to work on free speech law, understood broadly. This is not limited to First Amendment law, but includes federal or state statutes, common law rules, state constitutional provisions, transnational or international legal provisions, and rules of important private institutions—so long as they relate to the regulation (or deregulation) of speech, press, expression, assembly, expressive association, petition, and the like. Likewise, it includes doctrinal, historical, theoretical, and empirical scholarship.
• We prefer projects on important but insufficiently studied topics, rather than on ones that have already been heavily researched by others.

To Apply, Please Submit:

• Your resume
• Your law school transcript
• Plans for at least two research projects, described in some detail; draft Introductions for what would become journal articles tend to be a good format
• At least one published or completed and publishable research article
• Any other articles, whether published or in draft
• Contact information for three professors or other legal scholars who can speak to your intellect, writing, or research agenda

Requirements:

The Research Fellowship position provides full Stanford benefits with a salary range of $80,000-125,000. Depending on individual circumstances, a housing and relocation allowance may also be provided.

Completed applications must be submitted online by Deadline to Apply: February 1, 2025

Please direct questions to Julie Park at [e-mail].

About Stanford University's Hoover Institution:

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace is a public policy research center devoted to the advanced study of economics, politics, history, political economy, and law—both domestic and foreign—as well as international affairs. It is located on the Stanford University campus and is an academic unit of the University.

The Hoover Institution is an equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Comments

[NvEric]

Eligibility Criteria ?
No 'seat of your pants' exceptionalism will be considered.

[Dr. Ed 2]

"A PhD in another discipline is not required, though neither is it frowned upon."

That's a good first step, but you also state that:

"This is not limited to First Amendment law, but includes federal or state statutes, common law rules, state constitutional provisions, transnational or international legal provisions, and rules of important private institutions—so long as they relate to the regulation (or deregulation) of speech, press, expression, assembly, expressive association, petition, and the like. Likewise, it includes doctrinal, historical, theoretical, and empirical scholarship."

You are more looking for someone with a Ph.D. in political science that someone with what essentially is a M.S. in law. You are more looking for a philosopher than a Perry Mason.

And with the extent that historical briefs are in vogue, skills as a historian -- and that involves training as a historian, i.e. Ph.D. in history.

Lawyers think they know everything and they don't. Three circuit judges and unknown numbers of lawyers and none of them knew that Natural Gas floats -- that unlike Propane, it is lighter than air and thus does NOT seep across the ground like Propane does...

Just sayin...

[sad_angels_fan]

I don't have a PhD in history because the recession crashed into my MA and I ended up getting my JD but why would I do law review when the ABA only allows me to work for pay when there's no school and I can only get a paid gig for anything if I have networked and worked enough free hours to the point where I didn't really need to take any classes my entire 3L year (I took 2 electives for a semester and spent the rest at an externship to hit 3000 hours). I didn't go to a Top 25 but seriously, if I applied here it would be the first time I submitted a resume in earnest since 2011, and that was part of the application process to law school. I kept getting poached but in the end when DHS essentially went rogue I quit. Turns out watching baseball and talking to people at SABR conferences may not be able to get over the whole "gambled on baseball" thing but it definitely helps your models in betting on baseball, and other sports. I only hit 33% of my bets but the ROI is a tad over 80%, n=12800. I have quite a few papers in history, Area Studies, and various areas of the law (Constitutional, criminal, administrative, actually, the civil aspects of legal practice bores me since trial work is far more interesting than anything else. It's also why I was a public defender and then CJA Panel Attorney instead of something more lucrative since my clients at least want to go to trial sometimes in that context. But since somehow a mix of luck, networking, and realizing that writing code was not actually hard and more reflective of the failings of American pedagogy that reinforces falsehoods that are created by its monolithic nature than anything else, effectively the proposed pay is less than my donations to Cato and Reason and IJ and Pac Legal, and actually, somehow, less than some of the offers I turned down after law school, although all of which were in IP (which is not equivalent to actual property rights, so I can't practice that with intellectual honesty even if I am well versed in the law).

But fundamentally, what I've found is that areas are unresearched not because there's no knowledge or knowledgable folks with JDs to write about them, but it takes so much explanation that nobody wants to read an overly technical subject. Like, the IRS put out bounties that induced companies to violate the CFAA and paid out even though ultimately it did not amount to any meaningful outcomes, but to explain the technical aspects of that would make pretty much any person who reads law review articles fall asleep. I've actually tried to do this already and there's also a 4th Amendment issue there but without anyone with standing (there's no actual injury since it was clumsy and did not work and in fact the fact that the IRS paid out for the failures was puzzling until video of the method surfaced recently, where the company openly admitted failure). The operators of the infrastructure that were the target of the attack had done no wrongs and would be considered US persons. Then again, this sort of chicanery is nothing new, but it's not authorized by congress for the IRS to put out bounties to direct traffic fraudulently to log them in a fishing expedition, why did the taxpayers foot the bill? For that matter, one of the companies have been pretending to be able to trace crypto transactions and then attribute them to real life persons and their actions. This is plainly impossible since they can't actually even determine whether a person or a computer (or more recently, AI, which have acted autonomously in the realm since 2018) is in control, never mind which person. All these chill expression as they are paying to create the chilling effect and the chilling effect is evident, but they have not successfully used the method to identify anyone, and indeed, can only theoretically do so if they time travel back to around 2017-2018. I know plenty who care about one or the other issue but few who understand both, by few I mean none in an in depth manner. They might be out there, although I doubt it since in the developer's chats I seem to be the only person who understand the issue in a legal sense. So sure, at this point I don't even need you to pay me and I can put it on some substack, but nobody cares, and that's a much bigger problem: there's a huge gulf between the legal profession and the tech profession that can't easily be bridged since both take far too much time to master. I'm the outlier by far.

I grew up in a position of privilege in an authoritarian country with no rule of law and chose freedom over power because ultimately power is the problem. Lord Acton's adage applies, and that's before the context of his adage is explained: the power that corrupts is papal infallibility, and Lord Acton was the leading Catholic public intellectual in England at the time writing to a Church of England bishop. There's enough dynamite there for the Troubles to begin before Parnell. Even the obvious observation of truth can be dangerous. I'm the only person I know who spoke to someone on the PLA's side candidly about the events of June 6 1989, and I can confirm that because there's something said that only those present know - censorship efforts have been so thorough that I've parodied the phrase on the Chinese copycat of Github with no effect. I know it because I've represented dissidents - and they are just different sorts of ethno-nationalists. Their democratic vision is not America's, and some applaud the persecution of Uyghurs. There's far too much nuance on everything historical and it's far too much writing that nobody wants to read. It challenges the supporters as well as detractors, and people don't want to be challenged. Lawyers at least know that they won't win every case, but even practitioners don't usually accept that they missed the issue entirely. Unless you're actively seeking heterodox voices explicitly, you'll get a lot of dullness from people who also don't see "code is law" as a 1L-level pun, but from the other angle. Why bother? Also, salaries should be adjusted with state income tax added. Baseball contracts do. I'm not relocating, Nevada may be hot, but it is 24 hours, mostly natural disaster free, Google Fiber is coming, no income tax, and 5 random people is enough to get the gaming board to allow iGaming. I got the DEA to admit that they don't care about patients and my job is done. Excuse me, I have more funerals to attend.