Dorf on Law

Donald Trump and his enablers regularly punish large groups of people for the perceived sins of one person, or at most the sins of a much narrower set of people.  Group punishment (also called collective punishment) happens to be a war crime , most fundamentally because it is the intentional infliction of harm on innocent people.  Worse than punishing people's direct relatives in a Hatfields-versus-McCoys way -- which is plenty bad -- group punishment is based on finding an arbitrary connection among people, something like saying that it is not only a perpetrator's immediate family who are "guilty" and thus punishable but that the in-laws of his 18th cousins thrice removed must also pay the price. And yes, group punishment truly is immoral, as decent people and international law have agreed at least since the end of World War II.  My concern today is with the almost random way in which Trump identifies the relevant "kinship" bond when he decides to punish pe...

Tomorrow morning the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Trump v. Cook . I intend to listen along to the Court's Live Audio feed and to post snarky comments on BlueSky ( here ) while doing so. As the case comes to the Court, it presents a number of issues, including: Can pre-appointment conduct constitute "cause" for removal of a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors? Did the President's purported removal of Lisa Cook from her position based on unproven allegations violate her Fifth Amendment right to due process? To what extent can courts review a presidential for-cause removal that appears to be pretextual? Was the district court's order maintaining Cook in office a proper remedy? The Solicitor General contends in his  main merits brief  that "this case does not involve the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve Board's Removal protections," but that is only true in a technical sense. If Trump prevails based on the record here, t...

Today is the day officially designated to honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., although one suspects that President Trump and his enablers are working to de-establish it as a national holiday or perhaps to re-designate it in some way. This year MLK Day happens to fall on January 19, so perhaps the observance in the White House will mark the 60-year anniversary of the election of Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister of India . Whether or not Trump even knows who she was, his political career has thus far echoed hers: an unlikely national leader with rabid followers whose tenure was characterized by corruption, militarism, and authoritarianism. Here at DoL , however, we observe MLK Day for real. Accordingly, below is an essay that first ran eleven years ago . It seems fitting for this year, as its focus is on the role of fears regarding civil unrest in the selection of Dr. King (rather than Thurgood Marshall, whom I propose as a hypothetical alternative) as the national p...

The world is on fire, and we have larger issues to be worried about than life tenure for Supreme Court justices. On the other hand, the world is on fire at least partly because of the 6-3 GOP super-majority that has enabled Trump in a myriad of terrible ways. So, behold the effects of life tenure.  We are approaching the tenth anniversary of Justice Scalia’s death on February 13, 2016. Despite there being almost a year left in President Obama’s term, Senator Mitch McConnell infamously refused to give Obama’s nominee a hearing. But, had Justice Scalia, who was in poor health at the time of his death, died just one year earlier, it is extremely unlikely that McConnell could have delayed the nomination for a full two years, and President Obama would have named Scalia’s successor. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020. Had she passed away just four months later, President Biden would have been able to name her successor. Change the dates of the deaths of these two lega...

This is in response to one of Steve Vladeck's “One First" essays from last month (“ Progressive Judicial Institutionalism ”), which was itself a response to an op-ed in The Guardian (“ It’s time to accept that the Supreme Court is illegitimate and must be replaced ”). I agree with Professor Vladeck that "tossing the baby" would be a mistake. That is, delegitimizing the institution such that it no longer has any authority to constrain the other branches, is a real risk that should be avoided. As Vladeck notes, the federal courts writ large (if not the Supreme Court itself) have been instrumental in constraining a hyperaggressive executive branch. We can and should distinguish between the Article III branch and the current composition of the Supreme Court when criticizing SCOTUS or proposing reforms. The question then is what can be done about a Supreme Court that many perceive to be out of step and unaccountable. There have been many suggestions—term limits, expansion...

Even after roughly three and a half hours of oral argument in the two SCOTUS cases involving state bans on transgender females' participation in girls' and women's sports yesterday, much remains unclear. I counted at most four votes--the three Democratic appointees and possibly Justice Gorsuch--for the plaintiffs/respondents in the two cases. Thus, I agree with the headline of the NY Times story on the case: Justices Seem Inclined to Allow States to Bar Transgender Athletes . "Seem" and "inclined" are useful qualifiers, if not so much for the bottom line as to signify that there are a lot of moving pieces. Here I'll focus chiefly on the as-applied/facial distinction and then say a few words about two other subjects. Is an As-Applied Equal Protection Challenge Permissible? The lawyers for Idaho, West Virginia, and the U.S. as amicus all urged the Court to reject the challenges on what they portrayed as a clean and easy ground. I'll summarize their...

The killing of an American citizen in broad daylight by an ICE agent continues to dominate headlines, as it should.  One response to the outrage has been to call for the impeachment of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.  Indeed, at the end of last week Robin Kelly, a Democratic Member of Congress from Illinois, announced that she would file three articles of impeachment against Noem, writing that Noem "has turned ICE into a rogue force, violating the Constitution, tearing families apart, and leaving death in her wake.  From Chicago to Minneapolis, her recklessness cost lives, including Renee Nicole Good. This isn't just dangerous—it's impeachable. I'm fighting back." Given the certainty that no (or at most a tiny handful of) Republicans in the House or Senate would even consider supporting Kelly's effort, is this purely performative?   Jan-Werner Müller  wrote persuasively in  The Guardian  that even a process that ultimately ends with no impeachment...

Last week, I filled in for Jasmin Singer as the co-host (with Mariann Sullivan) of the Hen Report, one of the three weekly podcasts in the Our Henhouse family of podcasts--which feature news and more about animal rights and animal welfare. Mariann and I discussed the challenges and opportunities of making common cause on particular issues with strange bedfellows, i.e., people who hold views or work for causes with which one generally disagrees but who are allied on one or more other issues. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. The discussion was inspired by a number of recent news stories, including the announcement at the end of last year that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is working to end federally funded animal testing. For those of us who care about animal rights and animal welfare, that's good news. The fact that it came from RFK Jr., however, is puzzling, given that he is a hunter who promotes the con...

Three months ago today, I began my  Dorf on Law column with this observation: "One of the laments that I have seen more and more in the Trump II era is some variation on this rhetorical question: 'How is  this  not the only thing that we are talking about?'"  I then argued that the militarized attack by ICE agents on a Chicago apartment building and its residents, which included the zip-tying of elderly citizens and children (with one witness saying that an agent said, " f*** them kids"), was the only thing that anyone should have been talking about. That incident remains one of the most shocking stories in a year filled with jaw-dropping evil, but I must sadly report that it is no longer the one thing that everyone should be talking about.  As everyone reading this column surely knows, the new occupant at the top of the list of malevolence is the cold-blooded murder of a young woman in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good, two days ago . Unfortunately, even th...