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1 week 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 week 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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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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3 weeks 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.
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3 weeks 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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3 weeks 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 month 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.
