Dorf on Law

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...

My latest Verdict column  (favorably) discusses the final report of the US Commission on Civil Rights on the topic of the federal response to campus antisemitism. In the column, I provide a link to my original written testimony and to the video of my oral testimony before the Commission back in February. For completeness, I'm devoting today's entry on the blog to publishing the supplemental letter I sent the Commission in March. It is also available in the folder labeled "Panel 1" here but you have to jump through some hoops to find it. Because I republished my initial written testimony on the blog, I thought it sensible to include the supplemental here.   Supplemental Submission of Michael C. Dorf * Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, Cornell Law School   United States Civil Rights Commission   RE: Antisemitism on America’s College and University Campuses: Current Conditions and the Federal Response   March 24, 2026   Distinguished commissioners:   ...