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3 weeks ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
The NY Times recently reported that the Justice Department is using a "cooperating witness" in its investigation of the Harvard Law Review (HLR) for alleged discrimination against white men. The Times article's primary focus is on the unusual circumstance that the cooperating witness--who was a HLR staffer until his graduation last week--is also now employed by the government and working for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
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3 weeks ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
Here's a recent social media post from President Trump:As the foregoing rant makes clear, the occasion for Trump's turn against Leonard Leo, some of the judges Trump appointed in his first term, and the Federalist Society was the fact that some of those people believe that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not grant the president the authority to impose the sweeping tariffs Trump imposed.
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1 month ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
L. M. was a 7th-grade student in a Massachusetts public middle school. He wore a t-shirt to school with the message "There Are Only Two Genders" in evident protest of the school's lessons and activities promoting gender identity diversity and inclusivity. He was told by school authorities that he could not wear that shirt. He then donned a shirt that said "There Are CENSORED Genders." The school told him to change from that shirt as well. He did. Then he sued.
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1 month ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
N.B. The spending bill passed by the House of Representatives last week (and now before the Senate) includes $25 billion for the development and eventual deployment of a missile defense system that President Trump is calling "Golden Dome." My latest Verdict column explains why this is a terrible idea: it won't work but will likely be destabilizing, increasing rather than decreasing the risk of nuclear war.
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1 month ago | 
verdict.justia.com | Michael C. Dorf
President Ronald Reagan proposed a space-based missile defense system—officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) but more commonly known as Star Wars—in 1983.
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1 month ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
[Note: Tomorrow I'll be attending an all-day gathering of constitutional scholars and lawyers hosted by the Knight Institute at Columbia to discuss federal funding and the First Amendment. Each of the participants wrote a short paper. They are collected here. My contribution can be found here and is reproduced below.]-----InAgency for Int’l Dev. v. Alliance for Open Society Int’l, Inc. (2013), the Supreme Court invalidated a condition on federal spending.
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1 month ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
Per my usual custom, below I have posted the final exam I gave the students in my Federal Courts class this past semester. They had four hours to complete the exam and were permitted access to their casebooks, notes, and outlines but not the Internet or AI tools. Note that the "No Kings Act" quoted at length in questions 2 and 3 is taken verbatim from the actual bill that was introduced in the Senate last year.
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1 month ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
On Thursday of last week, the Supreme Court used a shadow docket case--Trump v. Wilcox--to effectively overrule Humphrey's Executor v. United States--the one-hundred-year-old precedent that upheld the power of Congress to create federal agencies headed by commissioners who serve for fixed terms and cannot be fired by the president except for good cause. I say the Court "effectively" overruled Humphrey's because it did not officially do so.
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1 month ago | 
dorfonlaw.org | Michael C. Dorf
The Foreign Emoluments Clause of Article I provides that "no person holding any office of profit or trust under [the United States] shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state." In various articles (including this one), Professor Seth Barrett Tillman has argued that the clause restricts only persons holding appointments to offices created by statute and thus doesn't apply to the...
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1 month ago | 
verdict.justia.com | Michael C. Dorf
Over the course of two and a half hours of oral argument yesterday, the Supreme Court considered whether to grant the Trump administration’s request to cut back on three federal district court rulings invalidating the President’s executive order denying United States citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who are either undocumented or legally in this country temporarily.
