Sixteen Fun Facts About Me

Prominent economist Bryan Caplan and political commentator Richard Hanania have started a “Sixteen Fun Facts About Me” meme on their respective blogs/substacks. Here is my list (in rough chronological order):

1. I was born in the then-Soviet Union. As an infant and toddler, I spent a lot of time in the hospital, due to various ailments. One time, a nurse asked my mother if I was her only child. She said yes. “That’s unfortunate,” the nurse commented, with typically awful Soviet bedside manner, “because this one probably won’t live.” Fortunately, the nurse turned out to be wrong, and I survived.

2. I didn’t learn how to read in either English or Russian until the age of eight – a consequence of lack of motivation and possible undiagnosed dyslexia. But when I finally did learn, I almost immediately started reading adult books, rather than those meant for kids. My daughter Lydia – probably the family member most like me – didn’t learn to read until the age of nine. A consequence of dyslexia which did get diagnosed. We spent many hours memorizing sight words with her to overcome it. When Lydia did finally learn, the first book she read on her own was the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, which is intended for adults.

3. I grew up in the Boston area and have been a big Boston sports fan since I was about nine. The first team I followed closely was the 1982-83 Boston Bruins, who had the best record in the NHL, but lost in the conference finals in the playoffs (I’m still mad about that). My favorite player was Rick “Nifty” Middleton, the Bruins’ leading goalscorer. In retrospect, the best player on the team was actually Ray Bourque, who went on to become one of the two or three best defensemen ever, and arguably the second-greatest Bruin after Bobby Orr.

4. In middle school and high school, I often worked as a babysitter. I wish I could say I did it to break down gender stereotypes (most babysitters are female, which was even more true back then). But the real reason was that I found babysitting less onerous and unpleasant than mowing lawns, and other yard work. A five-year-old I sat for once told me that he obeyed me far more than his parents. I asked why that is. “Because,” he said, “when you tell me to do something, I know you really mean it.” When I became a parent myself, many years later, I came to understand why it’s hard to “really mean it” when disciplining your own kids.

5. My first official on-the-books job was working at the Lexington, MA public library when I was 15. I had the impressive-sounding title of “Assistant Librarian.” But the actual work was stacking and reshelving books. Much of the time, I could not resist the temptation to read the books, instead of stacking them. My supervisor eventually got tired of this, and told me I had to either quit or be fired. I resigned to spend more time with my family.

6. My most significant extracurricular activity in high school was the debate team. One time, when we were preparing for a tournament, we decided should call Harvard philosophy Prof. John Rawls (who lived in Lexington) for advice on an argument we were developing. My teammate Anjan Mukherjee (who later went on to become a prominent financier) said I should be the one to call Rawls. “You should talk to him,” he said, “because you guys have a lot in common.” The idea that a world-famous political philosopher had anything in common with an obscure high school sophomore seemed totally ridiculous. But I called Rawls anyway, and he generously spent half an hour on the phone answering my questions. We didn’t learn anything that was useful for the tournament (Rawls said he hadn’t thought about our issue). But the story became a minor debate-world legend. I recounted it in a bit more detail in my 2010 immigration memoir (pp. 25-26).

7. I became a libertarian later that same year, after I read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick was Rawls’ great critic and rival). In contrast to most young libertarians of my generation and the one before, I was never much influenced by Ayn Rand, though I respect her achievements in becoming one of the greatest-ever popularizers of libertarian ideas (which is not at all how she saw herself!).

8. The first girl I ever fell in love with was a high school debate opponent. My cause was pretty much doomed from the start, in part because she was two years older (a big difference at that age). But we kept in touch in later years.

9. In different life circumstances (especially if born in the US rather than the Soviet Union), I can see myself potentially becoming a left-liberal or (less likely) even a socialist. But I think I could never have been a social conservative or a nationalist. I’m too skeptical of authority and tradition to be a social conservative. And the illogical and anti-intellectual nature of most nationalist ideology is totally inimical to me. I hate both socialism and nationalism, and recognize that the former has the higher body count of victims, including the single biggest mass murder in the entire history of the world. But the hostility to nationalism is more intuitive and visceral. Not coincidentally, my favorite among my many nonacademic publications is probably “The Case Against Nationalism” (coauthored with Alex Nowrasteh).

10. The summer after my freshman year at Amherst College, I worked as an intern at the Cato Institute. They assigned me to be a research assistant for legendary economist Julian Simon, famous for being the author of The Ultimate Resource. Simon’s brilliance was incredible. But the job went badly, in part because he wasn’t always clear about what he wanted, and I didn’t try hard enough to figure it out; plenty of blame to go around! In later years, I made sure to be more clear with my own RAs. Cato generously overlooked this rocky start to our relationship. They made me an adjunct scholar in 2008, and eventually their B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies in 2022 (in addition to my primary job as a law professor at George Mason University).

11. If I liked math and was good at it, I might well have become an economist. But, sadly, I’m pretty bad at it, and I really hate doing it. Thus, I went to political science graduate school at Harvard. Eventually, I decided to do a joint degree with Yale Law School, with a view to potentially becoming a law professor. I chose that path because 1) the law professor job market seemed a bit less competitive than that in political science and 2) the male-female ratio in poli sci grad school was heavily skewed towards the former, and I thought I would have a better chance of finding a girlfriend in law school. When students ask me about my career choices, I emphasize that 2 was not really a good criterion for choosing a graduate program! If necessary, find dates outside of school.

12. The summer after my first year in law school, I worked as a student law clerk at the Institute for Justice, a major public interest law firm. One of the cases I worked was CRDA v. Banin, in which Donald Trump had influenced Atlantic City to use eminent domain to take an elderly woman’s house so that he could build a parking lot for one of his casinoes on the site. The court eventually invalidated the taking because it was not for a “public use,” as required by the state constitution. This experience helped stimulate an interest in constitutional property rights, which later became a major focus of my research agenda as an academic.

13. In the fall of 1998, I interviewed for summer associate positions at various New York and Washington, DC law firms. One of the interviewers who came to Yale that year was future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He recommended that his firm invite me for a “call back” interview at their offices in DC. But, afterwards, I didn’t get the summer associate offer. Usually, students who got a call back interview were almost guaranteed to get summer associate positions. I e-mailed Kavanaugh to ask what went wrong. He said he wanted to hire me, but partners at the firm said “no” because they thought I was too likely to leave the firm to become an academic. The partners weren’t wrong!

14. I met my future wife, Alison, at an Institute for Humane Studies event in 2008 (we both previously won IHS fellowships). My wooing was aided by the fact that she was a regular reader of the Volokh Conspiracy blog, and already knew who I was. Her favorite among my blog posts was “The Case for Paying Dead Farmers Not to Farm Instead of Living Ones.” I still oppose farm subsidies, especially the kind that seek to reduce output rather than increase it. But supporters can argue they help bloggers find spouses, and thereby increase the birth rate!

15. I am a longtime science fiction and fantasy fan, and have a long list of publications and blog posts on various issues related to the politics of those genres. This hasn’t done much to advance my academic career. But it did once get me a speaking invitation to go to Australia! This year, I’m going to be the presenter/keynote speaker at the Libertarian Futurist Society’s annual Prometheus Award ceremony.

16. After becoming a career academic, I did not expect to ever do any significant litigation. As the saying goes, those who cannot do, teach! But the litigation that led to the invalidation of Trump’s massive IEEPA tariffs originated in a blog post I wrote in February 2025. Jeff Schwab of the Liberty Justice Center contacted me about it, and we eventually agreed I would work with them on a case pursuing the ideas I laid out. I then did a follow-up post seeking clients. One of my former students read the post, and showed it to his uncle, Victor Schwartz, a wine importer whose business was gravely damaged by the tariffs. Victor’s firm, V.O.S. Selections became our lead plaintiff in the case. After almost a year of litigation and two lower court wins the Supreme Court ruled in our favor. We were eventually joined by prominent Supreme Court litigators Michael McConnell and Neal Katyal, and it was Katyal who did the oral argument before the Supreme Court. But the blog post got things started.