Dorf on Law

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 transcript   of the colloquy among Chronicle reporter Evan Goldstein, Yale Law Professor Cristina Rodriguez ,  Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro , and me. The link I provided above is for Chronicle subscribers only, so I'll summarize and quote from the transcript below for the benefit of non-subscribers. Near the end of our colloquy, we turned to the news that the Trump administration is investigating the Harvard Law Review (HLR) for allegedly using racial criteria as part of the selection processes for student editors and the authors of the articles it publishes, especially the annual Foreword to the Supreme Court issue that leads each volume in November. Professor Rodriguez said this: I’m a piece of evidence in this potential lawsuit. I wr...

Mark Kende's illuminating post on Donald Trump and the Royal American Presidency highlights some of the ways in which President Trump is, in Professor Kende's words, "act[ing] above the law." Kende opens with a discussion of Trump v. United States , which extended absolute immunity from criminal prosecution to presidents for the exercise of their core constitutional powers and a broad presumptive immunity for remaining official acts (i.e., for official acts that fall outside the President's core constitutional powers). Professor Kende notes that Justices Sotomayor and Jackson used the word "king" in their dissents and argues that current events (sadly) have vindicated these dissenters' position. President Trump, Kende concludes, is acting as though he is "almost invincible."  Professor Kende points out correctly that our Constitution prohibits royalty, but the President's supporters like to justify his broad assertion of power by point...

Donald Trump’s attack on everything “DEI” is a racist attempt to reverse the hard-earned gains people of color have made in this country. This latest regression is nothing new. The history of fighting racism in America is slow progress, then serious resistance from conservative forces, which often results in harmful backsliding. This back and forth in the movement towards racial equality can be illuminated by examining the careers of two of the most important Black athletes in American history and comparing the arcs of their lives to the fight, still on-going, to desegregate America’s public schools. Sometimes, history does provide important parallels and lessons for the present. To see these connections, we must travel back to post-World War II America. Although the National Basketball Association and the Civil Rights Movement both already existed immediately after the War, they took off during the early 1950’s and 1960’s.  In 1954, the Supreme Court famously decided  Brown v...

My last post was about how President Trump acts like royalty. This post is about how he may be our greatest man-child President. Most children love parades. How is this relevant? Well, President Trump’s 79th birthday falls on the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. Normally, there is not much fanfare about Army birthdays. But the Army is thinking of having a big military parade in Washington D.C. on that day . President Trumps likes the idea. He saw such a parade in Paris on Bastille Day 2017, and he was impressed with the horses and planes. He almost had such a parade during his first term but pulled back. There are, however, problems with a parade. France is something of an outlier among democratic countries. Mostly dictators in autocratic countries like Russia and North Korea have showy parades. The parades symbolize military might, not democratic values. We don’t want to be on that list. But the parades also highlight which countries have the biggest military “toys," even wh...

On January 25th, 2025, three nonprofit organizations from Texas and Arizona challenged a proclamation by newly-installed President Donald Trump that disallowed  immigrants from remaining in the U.S. while pursuing asylum claims in a federal district court. Ignoring a long series of laws and previous executive actions, the President’s statement barred immigrants who arrived after the date of the proclamation from invoking provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which would permit them to remain in the United States while pursuing asylum claims. On behalf of the plaintiffs, the nonprofits argued that Trump’s order , and the Department of Homeland Security, which was tasked with implementing it, violated multiple laws and Constitutional provisions. Documented on a new webpage created by Just Security under the rubric Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions , the case against DHS was only the first in a cascading wave of lawsuits by nonprofits, l...

Regular readers of this blog might be wondering: Hey, this is supposed to be Dorf   on Law. Where's Dorf this week?  Wonder no more. I've been blessed to have a surfeit of content from my co-bloggers this week, with more still to come very soon. But if you're wondering what I've been up to this week, here's an extremely brief recap: Trump : My latest Verdict column takes as its starting point a NY Times article describing the results of a survey of legal scholars about the worst excesses of the Trump administration thus far. I was one of the 35 respondents to the survey and am briefly quoted in the article. After a few preliminary observations, the heart of my column consists of my detailed answers to the questions posed by the Times . Fetuses/Animals : I am the guest on the podcast The Vegan Report by Rayane Laddi  for a long-ish interview that focuses primarily on the argument Sherry Colb and I laid out in our 2016 book, Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Righ...

Yesterday morning, the Supreme Court considered whether the state of Oklahoma was required to approve and fully fund a Catholic charter school in its charter school program. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the answer may well be yes. With Justice Barrett recused, it all depends on whether Chief Justice Roberts joins the four other conservatives.   The case started when Oklahoma’s Charter School Board voted 3-2 to approve St. Isidore, a Catholic charter school—a school that intended to incorporate Catholicism into every aspect of the school. That decision was eventually reversed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Its ruling is now under review. Just to be clear, the question before the Supreme Court was not whether the State of Oklahoma is constitutionally allowed to use taxpayer dollars to directly and wholly fund a Catholic charter school given the Establishment Clause, which has long barred direct government funding of religious proselytization and education. Rather, the q...

Professor Corinna Barrett Lain's new book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Secret of Lethal Injection (New York: New York University Press) came out this week. It is a tour de force, the best single volume about lethal injection and one of the best recent books about the death penalty more generally. It is also timely. While many of President Trump's other actions have (understandably) generated more recent attention, he did issue a Day One Executive Order encouraging more executions at both the federal and state level.  It feels odd to say about a scholarly book about the death penalty, but Secrets of the Killing State is fun. Lain is a gifted storyteller. The book provides a lot of information about lethal injection, but it reads more like a story. Secrets of the Killing State is a great resource for lawyers working on lethal injection cases, but it's also an accessible, easy read for lay people who want to learn more about the topic.   Lain begins with the mi...