Dorf on Law

This year's Vice Presidential non-debate happened two days ago.  Thankfully, I am spending October as a visiting scholar in Dublin, so it was 2am Wednesday here when Tim Walz and J.D. Vance entered the CBS studio on Tuesday evening.  Professor Dorf thus drew the short straw for writing Dorf on Law 's immediate reaction, and his analysis was much more informative and interesting than the event itself.  I recommend it to anyone who has not yet had a chance to read it. In any case, I will not bury my lead/lede: Vance exposed himself as even more of a shameless liar, and he did nothing to change or explain his chilling lack of care for the human beings who have suffered because of his bottomless pit of ambition.  (See my commentaries from last week here , here , here , and especially here .)  Yet somehow, the story from the non-debate is that he was "smooth" and maybe even "normal."  So I guess all it takes to neutralize a very recent history of embracing neo-N

In January 2022, I learned that Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes was a Yale Law School graduate. That morsel kindled my curiosity: which alum most embarrasses YLS? I conducted an unscientific poll via Twitter in which I gave respondents four choices: Rhodes; Bill Clinton; Samuel Alito; and Alan Dershowitz. (Four was the maximum number of possible choices, so I had to omit other worthy potential contestants, like Clarence Thomas.) To my surprise, Dershowitz won not just a plurality but an outright majority. I wrote up my results in a kidding/not-kidding blog post . Shortly thereafter, Dershowitz wrote an unintentionally hilarious response on the website of a Middle-East focused right-wing organization in which he: (a) asserted without a hint of irony that as a zealous advocate for his clients he was following in the footsteps of John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, and Thurgood Marshall; (b) attempted to discredit me by pointing out that Laurence Tribe--who was my mentor an

In a recent essay on this blog, Professor Eric Segall argued that the conservatives who have long mocked Justice Douglas's opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut   for its invocation of penumbras and emanations from the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights have done the equivalent--and then some--for their pet projects, including Presidential immunity. I agree wholeheartedly with the critique, which, not to put too fine a point on it, accuses the Roberts Court of rank hypocrisy. I write today to linger over the alternatives to penumbras and emanations in Griswold itself. Within a short time after Griswold was decided, its rationale shifted from Justice Douglas's penumbras and emanations to the more frank embrace of substantive due process of Justice Harlan, which he described in a concurrence in the judgment in Griswold and had foreshadowed in his dissent from the jurisdictional holding in  Poe v. Ullman . When I teach Griswold , students are sometimes puzzled why Douglas didn&

Google recently released a free tool called NotebookLM that enables users to upload numerous documents and then chat with an AI about the content. It's not clear to me that this is very different from other AI tools that enable users to interrogate materials they upload but it has one huge advantage: Google does not use the files users upload to train the model, so one can take advantage of the tool without worrying about giving away one's content. On the latest episode of the podcast Hard Fork , hosts Casey Newton and Kevin Roose (yes, the NY Times reporter whom chatGPT famously tried to convince to leave his wife) discuss NotebookLM with Steven Johnson, who works at Google Labs and helped create NotebookLM. From their discussion, I inferred that NotebookLM could be a useful tool for scholars, journalists, and others trying to organize information from many sources. One feature of NotebookLM especially intrigued Newton and Roose: its ability to create podcasts with human-soun

There are no gold bars pictured in the indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, but in other ways it is very much reminiscent of the charges that were brought against New Jersey's now-former Senator and convicted felon Robert Menendez. Whereas Menendez took money from Egypt in exchange for influence, the new indictment alleges that an only slightly less authoritarian Middle Eastern ally--Turkey--was the benefactor of Adams. And while mostly Adams appears to have exchanged favors for campaign contributions, like Menendez, he also allegedly sought and obtained personal goodies--paying economy fares for international flights and then being upgraded to business class by his Turkish friends. The two corruption cases share an additional feature. Menendez was initially defiant even in the face of what appeared to be (and turned out was considered by a jury to be) overwhelming evidence. So too, despite screenshots of damning email exchanges and a level of detail that the Justice Depa

J.D. Vance is a walking disaster for some very big reasons, the most important of which include his cruelty toward immigrants (and toward anyone else who happens to be near the blast zone of an anti-immigration stunt gone very bad), his deliberate lying, his sexist/racist/eugenicist worldview, his desire to make divorce more difficult (even for women in violent marriages), and of course his anti-abortion insanity.  I discussed all of those issues in a new Verdict column today, " Vance Vance Devolution " (the title of which is a nod to a classic arcade game ).  It was exhausting even to think about just how awful the guy is. My double - length Verdict column on Monday and Tuesday of this week, along with my Dorf on Law column on Tuesday, all prominently featured criticisms of Vance along with other matters.  Today's Verdict column, however, was all-Vance-all-the-time (with necessary references to Donald Trump along the way).  Even after writing all of that, however,

For many decades, conservative judges, law professors, and political pundits ridiculed Justice Douglas' reasoning in the landmark case Griswold v. Connecticut . While striking down a statute that forbade all contraception use and prohibited doctors from giving advice about contraception, Justice Douglas relied on six constitutional provisions to find a right to privacy in the Constitution because "s pecific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance."  A few years later, Roe was based on the right to privacy.  The disgust on the right for Douglas' penumbras and emanations reasoning has been severe, often cruel, and always dismissive. One commentator observed that "perhaps the most important and puzzling spatial metaphor in American constitutional law is Justice Douglas' 'penumbra' from Griswold v. Connecticut ." In one of the most famous law review articles

How is it not an ongoing story that the Republicans' vice presidential candidate (a Yale Law graduate) stated in all seriousness last week that he will continue to call immigrants who arrive in the US legally "illegal immigrants"?  No, that was not a typo or an unfair characterization.  Here is what J.D. Vance said in response to a reporter who had pointed out to Vance that the Haitian immigrants in Ohio -- who are now living in fear (along with their US-born neighbors) because of the lies that Vance and Donald Trump have continued to spew -- are in fact legally residing in the country: Now the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants … they are here legally. And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs: mass parole and temporary protective status. She used two programs to wave a wand and to say, “We’re not going to deport those people here.” Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still