Dorf on Law

In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky published  Worlds in Collision , in which he argued that astronomical events such as the supposed expulsion of Venus as a comet from Jupiter occurred within the span of ancient human civilizations, that the resulting planetary interactions led to catastrophes on Earth, and that accounts of an ancient flood in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh and other events that are described in similar terms in different cultures were records of the consequences of the celestial collisions. Velikovsky had no training in science, history, or any other relevant discipline. He was a psychiatrist. Nonetheless, his book made a splash. Scientists knew that Velikovsky's astronomy was bunk but were impressed by his historical account of ancient religious texts and myths. Bible scholars, historians, and archeologists familiar with the relevant materials knew that Velikovsky's reconstruction of ancient events was bunk but were impressed by his science. Very few people we...

In an ideal world, the Earth would not be facing the climate crisis it now faces. In an imperfect but still much better world than the one we inhabit, the United States would be leading or at least participating in global efforts to greatly reduce greenhouse gases. We were heading towards such a world when Congress enacted the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, which would have done a lot of work towards reducing U.S. emissions. However, we are now living under a presidential administration intent on promoting the burning of fossil fuels and discouraging the use of renewable energy. The reversals of federal climate policy under the Trump administration include  rescission of the endangerment finding  earlier this year and its abandonment of carbon emission regulation of stationary sources  under the Clean Air Act just in the last few weeks. There is now effectively no federal regulation of global-warming-causing greenhouse gases. Can state and local governments f...

Today the Supreme Court opens its October 2026 Term, though the idea of a term with a beginning and an end is mostly ceremony now. In the shadow docket era, the Court decides important and complicated issues without full briefing or oral argument, and often with the justices languishing at luxury getaways, domestic and abroad, some of them subsidized by Harlan Crow or Paul Singer . Since the last term's final opinions came down, the Court has let construction of the President's ballroom continue on the ruins of the East Wing, and it allowed deportations to third countries to resume over a lower court's finding that migrants were not getting a fair chance to raise fear of torture. And yet the President cries foul. Asked by Time whether he regrets nominating Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump said : "Yeah. Yeah. What can I do? I put them in. They voted against me too often." He added, "I do like loyalty, yeah." Two weeks earl...

A number of readers and others have asked for my view of the lawsuit filed by Jane Doe and the ensuing controversy over her treatment by the Cornell police, the Ithaca District Attorney, and the university. I was reluctant to say anything because I have no direct knowledge of the case, which I first learned about when it made the news a couple of weeks ago. However, I suppose I am more knowledgeable than at least some of the millions of people expressing views on social media, so I shall say a few words about the internal university treatment of the case and then about the criminal law as it stands and as it might soon be amended. To begin, two propositions are obvious to me. First, Cornell is hardly unique in the inadequacy of its responses to sexual violence. As is often the case, The Onion best captured this idea in a satirical story titled Nation Horrified To Think Sexual Assault Could Happen On College Campus.   With characteristic deadpan, the short piece includes the follow...

Note to readers:   I published the  column below on  Dorf on Law  on December 2, 2025.   For the multitude of obsessive Buchanan superfans out there, this republication might serve as a hint regarding my current whereabouts, while also explaining why I am running a  Dorf on Law  "classic" today rather than publishing new content. I should also note that, in the ten months since I wrote that column, the situation that I described has begun to change.  It took some time, but non-US universities have in fact begun to entice formerly US-based scholars to move across borders (and, other than universities in the never-51st-state, across oceans) in meaningful numbers.  I plan to write about those changes here on  Dorf on Law , and most likely on  Verdict  as well, very soon. In the first sentence of the paragraph above, I was tempted to add the word "fortunately" in front of "begun to change," but that is clearly not a sensible...

Yesterday on this blog, I reproduced my supplemental statement  to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for its campus antisemitism investigation. I simultaneously published a Verdict column describing and praising the Commission's final report on that subject. In today's essay, I want to explore some oddities of federal civil rights law raised by the topic. In my column, I state that discrimination (or inadequate measures to respond to discrimination) against Jews by a federally funded entity violates Title VI, where the discrimination is based on "Jewishness as a matter of ancestry." Readers unfamiliar with the details of federal civil rights law may wonder why I didn't simply say that such discrimination would violate Title VI as religious discrimination. The short answer is that Title VI forbids discrimination "on the ground of race, color, or national origin" but not on the basis of religion. Anti-Jewish discrimination is sometimes covered only bec...