You are right, but editorial control and ownership of the content belonged to the WP so his opinion pieces were for them because they decided if it could or could not be published and what was in it. Everything at the WP is FOR the WP – they own all the content and exercise complete editorial control. So basically he was their ’employee’ without being an ’employee’ – he was writing FOR them and not for himself.

“Most VC opinions are opposed to just about everything the woke WaPo stands for.”

Which is why the WP would only let it be published as ‘opinion’ instead of a journalistic staff type of thing – it gave the appearance of ‘equal time fairness’ without actually giving it equal time fairness because they controlled what he could or could not write. But that’s the past, lets move on to present day and we find that the WP is worse now. And about the time they went full woke that’s when Eugene Volokh left because its unlikely they would publish his opinion pieces any more and had dropped the pretense of ‘equal time fairness’.

That does not compute. Most VC opinions are opposed to just about everything the woke WaPo stands for. He would not have moved from his own site to the WaPo, and they would not have accepted him, under the condition that he write FOR them. As the VC banner says …

Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent | Est. 2002

All of Eugene Volokh’s ‘volokh-conspiracy’ opinion pieces at the WP were written FOR the WP. Its different with the move to Reason magazine as they are not written FOR Reason magazine but rather appear there as he wants them to. At the WP he didn’t have much editorial independence and could only write FOR them, at Reason magazine he doesn’t have to write FOR them but rather can write for himself with editorial control.

Look at that URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/09/21/nassau-county-das-office-forbids-prosecutors-from-having-handguns-even-at-home/

I can’t read the article behind a paywall, but that URL includes “volokh-conspiracy”.

For this article he was writing an opinion piece FOR the Washington Post, although he normally writes for the Volokh Conspiracy.