Dorf on Law

My latest Verdict column juxtaposes two recent criminal verdicts: the acquittal of Sean Dunn for throwing a Subway turkey sandwich at a Customs and Border Patrol agent sent by Donald Trump to make a show of fighting a nonexistent crime wave in the District of Columbia; and the conviction of animal rights activist Zoe Rosenberg for rescuing chickens from miserable conditions and imminent death at a slaughterhouse in Sonoma County, California. Each defendant engaged in conduct that they argued was harmless; each did so to make a political point. What explains the different results? In my column, I point to two main factors. First, the trial judge in Rosenberg's case did not allow her to present a necessity defense or evidence of the cruel conditions at the slaughterhouse, whereas the D.C. jurors were surely aware (from the video and because they live in D.C.) that Dunn was engaged in a form of protest. Second a great many D.C. residents, including jurors, would have shared Dunn'...

So the government shutdown is over, and eight Senate Democrats did exactly what everyone said they should not do: break ranks and end the shutdown while getting nothing from Republicans.  As I put it in September, two weeks before the shutdown began, "the  only  thing left for Democrats now is to 'win the politics' of the shutdown."  But even though the Democrats were clearly winning, with most Americans blaming Trump and the Republicans, these eight geniuses decided that it would be better to let Republicans up off the mat. Why?  One of the defectors, New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen, said this: "When I talk to my constituents in New Hampshire, you know what they say to me?  They say, 'Why can't you all just work together to address the problems that are facing this country?'"  I guess if "addressing" the problems of the country means making sure that they will get worse, then good work, Senator Shaheen! To be clear, while the media...

Repeating a pattern that has become all too familiar, late last week the Roberts Court issued a per curiam order staying a lower court ruling that had temporarily halted a plainly immoral and very likely unlawful Trump administration policy. In Trump v. Orr , the Court stayed an injunction against the administration's transphobic policy requiring that new and renewed passports list the passport holder's sex as their sex assigned at birth. As Justice Jackson (joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan) explained in dissent, the new policy reversed 33 years of prior practice (including in the first Trump administration) whereby transgender citizens could obtain passports that accorded with their current gender identity. The federal district court granted a preliminary injunction based on the likelihood that plaintiffs who challenged the policy would prevail in their equal protection claims that the policy: (1) discriminates based on sex and therefore must satisfy, but fails to satisf...

By now, everyone who pays attention to US politics has heard some version of the immediate conventional wisdom explaining the Democrats' across-the-board romps in Tuesday's elections.  The magic formula, we have already been told a zillion times, is that Democrats wisely focused on economic issues this time. That view has not been entirely unanimous, however, even among headline writers (who are usually the laziest trend-followers one can imagine).  For example, covering the governor's race in Virginia, the US version of  The Guardian  offered this headline confirming the insta-consensus: "Historic first for Spanberger after considered campaign against Trump: Democrat becomes first female governor in Virginia’s history and placed focus on living costs and public service."  On the other hand,  The New York Times   went with this : "Spanberger Wins Virginia Governor’s Race With Forceful Anti-Trump Campaign." So which was it, a "focus on living cos...

After two and a half hours of oral argument in yesterday's tariff cases , I ended up roughly where I started. I am nearly certain that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson will vote to invalidate the tariffs and that Justices Thomas and Alito will vote to sustain them. I have Justice Kavanaugh as quite likely to vote to sustain them. Of the remaining three Justices, Gorsuch seems most likely to vote to invalidate, whereas Roberts and Barrett are difficult to handicap. Rather than parse the full transcript to justify or qualify those assessments, I want to use today's essay to suggest that the arguments that seemed most appealing to the seemingly undecided conservatives ultimately point to one of two possible outcomes: either the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power or it should be construed to afford the president less deference in application than the Justices seem to be contemplating. Justice Gorsuch was ...

Donald Trump is asserting more executive power than any President since the Civil War. He would likely not only agree with that assessment but be proud of it. As a result, our constitutional republic is in great peril. As I wrote recently: What is at stake are the twin pillars of American democracy that for so long have defined the United States and staved off tyranny: federalism and separation of powers. In the  words   of the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, the “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Although Madison was discussing the separation of powers at the federal level, the same idea applies to federalism. As Justice Anthony Kennedy often pointed out, the founding fathers split the  “atom of sovereignty ” between the national government and the states to diff...

Three hundred sixty-four days ago was Election Day 2024.  The polls going into the final weeks had been tight, but Donald Trump's increasingly erratic and outright weird behavior had led some of his top campaign advisors to start leaking stories -- clearly in anticipation of a bad outcome for their side -- in which they were blaming each other for campaign blunders.  It is difficult to remember now, but Kamala Harris had meanwhile pulled together on short notice what looked very much like a winning, disciplined campaign. For people like me, this all merely meant that the agony of the 2020 post-election period was about to play out again -- but worse.  To my mind, the only thing that looked like a certainty was that Trump would be back in the White House on January 20, 2025, no matter what happened at the polls on and before November 5, 2024.  When the results turned out to show a surprising bare-minimum win for Trump, that was in its way good news , simply because i...