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1 day ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
As Mark Kende described here on the blog on Monday, President Trump's decision to allow entry to the United States of white South Africans as refugees--even as it denies such admission to thousands of Black and brown people facing persecution throughout the world--can only be described as racist. That's not to say that Trump admits the racism. On Monday, he said this:Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me.
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2 days ago | 
verdict.justia.com | Michael C. Dorf
When President George H.W. Bush nominated David H. Souter to the U.S. Supreme Court, his Chief of Staff John Sununu boasted that the nominee was a “home run” for the conservative legal movement. Sununu based that assessment on the recommendation of his fellow New Hampshire native, Republican Senator Warren Rudman. But Rudman himself had no real basis for such a judgment.
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1 week ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
Last week I participated in a wide-ranging discussion of the Trump administration's actions against higher education, with a special focus on Harvard. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a somewhat abridged transcriptof the colloquy among Chronicle reporter Evan Goldstein, Yale Law Professor Cristina Rodriguez, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro, and me.
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1 week ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
Regular readers of this blog might be wondering: Hey, this is supposed to be Dorf on Law. Where's Dorf this week? Wonder no more. I've been blessed to have a surfeit of content from my co-bloggers this week, with more still to come very soon.
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2 weeks ago | 
verdict.justia.com | Michael C. Dorf
For many years, the makers of Trident sugarless chewing gum ran an advertisement that included the line, “four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” That boast led to much comedy. Did twenty percent of dentists really recommend that patients chew gum with sugar instead? If so, was that because they wanted the extra business generated by the extra cavities? As with teeth, so with democracy.
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3 weeks ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order titled Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy. It aims to eliminate liability for race-neutral (or otherwise relevantly neutral) policies that have a disparate impact based on a protected characteristic. Wait, can he actually do that? The short answer is no. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is the federal statute that forbids employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
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3 weeks ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
President Donald Trump recently took to social media to call Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell a "major loser" for failing to lower interest rates "NOW." Read against the backdrop of Trump's statement that Powell's "termination cannot come fast enough" and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett's confirmation that the administration is studying whether Trump can fire Hassett, the broadsides against Powell wreaked further havoc on Wall Street. Understandably so.
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3 weeks ago | 
chroni.cl | Timothy D. Brennan |James Smoliga |Rafael Walker |Michael C. Dorf
The best movie I’ve seen this year is Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a political drama about the state repression of the thousands of Iranians who took to the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in protest of the death of Mahsa Amini, murdered by religious police for not wearing a hijab.
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3 weeks ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
Just before 1 AM on the morning of Saturday, April 19, the Supreme Court issued an order directing the U.S. government not to remove (i.e., send to El Salvador) any member of a group of Venezuelans currently detained in Texas pending the Court's further order. The Court acted early Saturday morning because it appeared that the Trump administration was about to violate the limits on removals set forth in its April 7 per curiam opinion.
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3 weeks ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
As John Oliver says at the top of each episode of Last Week Tonight, it has been a busy week. So busy, in fact, that for today's essay, I'm going to do a lightning round of observations on three of the major developments in just the last couple of days. 1. ContemptLet's start with Judge Boasberg's opinion in J.G.G. v.
