Dorf on Law

By Michael Dorf For this final post of 2017, I just want to direct readers to my latest essay on Verdict , where I argue that insofar as the new tax law punishes blue states and their residents, it is unconstitutional--even as I acknowledge that it would be very difficult to prove the claim in court. Here I simply want to add that I am aware of a potential critique, according to which it is never illicit for Congress to favor residents of the states with a majority of representatives; that's just politics, the critique goes; if you want more benefits for your state, win more elections. I would say three things in response. First, there's a difference between members of a legislature looking out for their own constituents--which we expect--and looking to punish voters in jurisdictions that voted for the minority party--which we have not hitherto expected. Second, as I said, I realize that this distinction in principle will be very difficult to apply in practice, which is why...

by Neil H. Buchanan Surprising everyone (including themselves), Congressional Republicans joined hands earlier this month and said, "Look at us, we're finally doing something !"  They then passed a blatantly regressive and extremely unpopular tax bill and started celebrating.  Donald Trump signed it, and here we are. It did not matter to Republicans: -- that no one (other than Republican donors and ideologues) thought that changing the tax system was even a medium priority, -- that the bill was written for (and in some cases was literally written by the lobbyists for) the largest corporations and wealthy people,  -- that the bill received the worst poll ratings of any major piece of legislation in history, -- that the bill made the tax system even more complicated than it already was, -- that the process of creating the bill was chaotic, compressed, and entirely partisan, -- that the Republicans went out of their way to take a whack at taxpayers in blue st...

by Michael Dorf Last week Federal District Judge George B. Daniels of the SDNY dismissed the lawsuit pending in his court against President Trump alleging violations of the (foreign and domestic) Emoluments Clauses on multiple procedural grounds. In under 30 double-spaced pages, Judge Daniels concluded that: the private plaintiffs who run businesses that compete with Trump's businesses lack Article III standing because their injuries are too speculative; they also lack Article III standing because their claims are not redressable; they lack prudential standing because their injuries do not fall within the zone of interest protected by the Emoluments Clauses; the institutional plaintiff CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) lacks Article III standing; the case presents a non-justiciable political question; and the lawsuit is not ripe. Wow! That's a lot of flaws. How could the plaintiffs' cast of all-star lawyers have filed such a weak case? The s...

By Eric Segall This term the Supreme Court is tackling an array of important constitutional questions, including how states organize their voting districts, the relationship between sexual orientation discrimination and freedom of speech and religion, and whether states may charge state employees mandatory fees for the work public sector unions do on their behalf. I certainly have a rooting interest in all three cases: please do something about partisan redistricting; don't cave to the discrimination is really free speech/freedom of religion trope; and, of course,s tates can charge fees to public sector union workers without first amendment restraint. However, my wish list is less substantive, but still important. So here goes:

by Neil H. Buchanan Possibly the most infuriating aspect of the tax circus that we have witnessed over the last few months is the Republicans' insistence that they are doing something difficult.  This is a "big win," say the Republicans, and the supposedly skeptical press prints headlines like "McConnell Gives Trump Gift to Celebrate Tax Win" and "U.S. House to Vote Again on Tax Bill, Trump on Verge of Win." I suppose the press justifies this by saying that the Republicans view it as a win, and the Democrats voted against it, making it accurate to score this as a W for the Republicans.  The problem is that this framing continues to ignore the fact that the Republicans can do whatever the hell they want to do .  They temporarily have the numbers to pass anything they want in both houses of Congress, limited only by whatever rules they decide to continue to impose on themselves. In other words, even if this bill is a victory for Republicans in s...

by Neil H. Buchanan The Republicans have now passed their stroke-the-rich tax bill, and we might (or might not, as I will explain tomorrow) be dealing with the consequences of this mess for years.  It continues to be ridiculous to call this a "fundamental tax overhaul" or "sweeping reform," as the major media outlets insist on doing ad nauseam, but the final bill did surprise me by being relatively large. I say "relatively" because George W. Bush's first big tax cut bill in 2001 was scored as a $1.35 trillion revenue loser over the standard ten-year budget window, whereas this one is somewhere between $1 and $1.5 trillion.  With national income having almost doubled from 2001 to 2017, the new tax cut is much smaller in any meaningful sense than Bush's bill. Indeed, The Washington Post 's fact-checker ran the numbers and found that the current bill is not only not especially large, but it is actually smaller than two tax cuts passed duri...

by Sherry F. Colb My column for this week  examines the case of Carpenter v. United States , which presents some important Fourth Amendment privacy issues. In particular, I consider Justice Gorsuch's peculiar reluctance at oral argument to utter the word "privacy" in connection with the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches, a reluctance that I suggest has substantive implications. In this post, I want to discuss a different sort of privacy invasion and how an experience of my own might bear on the question of why people do not always contemporaneously protest this type of invasion. When police want to search a person's car (or suitcase or house), they frequently ask for their target's consent. This is at least in part because an officer's desire to search does not always coincide with probable cause, a warrant, or whatever else might be required for a lawful search to take place. If a suspect gives consent to the police, however, then that ...

by Michael Dorf Yesterday, Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski retired effective immediately  in  response to the growing number of accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct by his former law clerks and others. Having yesterday described Judge Kozinski as a "bosshole" who nevertheless was genuinely fond of the law clerks he gratuitously overworked, I want to praise him today for having made the right call. Given his statement that he "cannot be an effective judge" in the face of the allegations, I assume that Judge Kozinski means to retire completely, rather than to take senior status. Whether Judge Kozinski's retirement fully ends the controversy over his conduct remains to be seen. In the meantime, I want to dwell a little bit on the role that his lawyer, Susan Estrich, briefly played in the saga. Late last week, Estrich issued the following statement on behalf of Judge Kozinski: "Many of the things that are being said about me are simply not tru...

by Michael Dorf [*** Update: Judge Kozinski has apparently decided to retire (by which he appears to mean retire entirely rather than take senior status). Although my piece below discusses Judge Kozinski, its main points are more general and thus, I hope, continue to be relevant to our national conversation about sexual harassment, sexual assault, and, as is the focus here, workplace bullying regardless of its gendered dimensions. Now back to what I wrote before learning of Judge Kozinski's retirement.] I do not have a #metoo story to relate of  sexual harassment by Judge Alex Kozinski , at least nothing in which I figured as a victim of any sort of abuse. But I do have a story . . . or rather, I know some stories. In any event, I'll start at the beginning.

by Michael Dorf Per my usual practice, I have set forth below the exam I recently gave to my first-year constitutional law students. It's got two questions with two parts each and was an 8-hour open-book take-home with a 2,500-word limit. Feel free to submit answers in the comments. I'm busy grading the students' exams, so I won't comment further on answers submitted here. Question 1 On January 10, 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters leads to a grand jury indictment of Donald Trump, Jr. In response, President Trump issues a full pardon to his eldest son. Sustained criticism ensues, with critics in the press and elsewhere complaining that the president is abusing his power by favoring a close family member. On January 13, Trump tweets:

by Michael Dorf In 1970, the University of Chicago Law Review published an article titled  Is Innocence Irrelevant? Collateral Attack on Criminal Judgments   by federal appeals court judge Henry Friendly. Judge Friendly was a judicial conservative in the small-c sense, non-ideological, committed to deciding cases narrowly, and an expert legal craftsman. As a young lawyer, Chief Justice John Roberts clerked for Friendly during Friendly's later years, and Roberts is fond of quoting (though not always abiding by) Friendly's aphorism that if it is not necessary to decide an issue to decide a case it is necessary not to decide the issue. Is Innocence Irrelevant?  was somewhat uncharacteristic of Friendly in that it offered a controversial policy proposal on a politically contentious issue. Writing in a period of transition from the Warren Court to the Burger Court, Friendly lamented that federal habeas corpus petitions by prisoners sentenced under state law were too o...

By William Hausdorff It’s easy to get overwhelmed by information overload regarding the colorful Trump White House, its defenders and its attackers.   But as I learned from Libra , Don DeLillo’s fictionalized account of the John F. Kennedy assassination, one doesn’t need to know exactly what is happening to understand the main plot lines.   That novel suggested that the essence of the Kennedy story was that there were at least three potentially murderous groups who felt aggrieved. These included Mafia figures furious that he named his brother as Attorney General, anti-Castro figures seething at Kennedy’s lack of support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, as well as pro-Castro figures outraged at the administration’s open hostility to Cuba. As described in Philip Shenon’s excellent non-fiction analysis , the latter group, to which Lee Harvey Oswald belonged, may have been especially enraged by the news of US attempts to assassinate Castro.   In some ways, then, it...

by Michael Dorf My latest Verdict column dives into the weeds of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. To summarize and over-simplify, I argue that while there are hard cases that pit liberty against equality, Masterpiece Cakeshop should be deemed an easy case. That's not because the baker has no interests in this case. He may well have a substantial stake in the outcome of the case. It's just that he cannot win on his free speech claim without blowing up anti-discrimination law, and his claim that he has suffered discrimination based on religion does not find support in the record. Here I want to address an issue I use to frame the discussion in the column: Should we understand apparent conflicts between liberty and equality as genuine--as value pluralists like Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams argued--or should we regard them as spurious--as Ronald Dworkin did? I'm not going to try to definitively resolve that question, but I am going to try to use it as a way of distingui...

[Note: This column was revised and edited for clarity at 8:05pm on December 11, 2017.] by Neil H. Buchanan As the Republicans in Congress try to drag their highly unpopular tax bill across the finish line, they have become ever more brazen in admitting what they really think about non-rich people who dare to complain about the feed-the-rich shamelessness of the Republicans' plan.  In case anyone had forgotten, Republicans are again making it clear that they think that non-rich people are lazy, shiftless leeches. An op-ed by two analysts at the New America Foundation cuts through the nonsense and points out the fundamental reality: "Republicans Are Bringing ‘Welfare Queen’ Politics to the Tax Cut Fight."  Senator Orrin Hatch's recent complaint about "people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything" merely reminds us of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's "makers and takers" meme and es...

By Eric Segall The Year of the Terrible started on January 20 th when the newly elected President of the United States gave his inauguration speech to the largest, most devoted crowd in the history of inauguration speeches. During that speech, he made clear what kind of role model and world leader he was going to be by proudly proclaiming “From this moment on, it's going to be America First…. We will follow two simple rules: buy American and hire American.” Of course, while Trump was speaking, his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was allegedly on the phone texting a comrade that a joint nuclear power project with Russia was “good to go.” The melding of the Kremlin and the White House was off to a very good start.

by Sherry F. Colb In my column this week , I discuss what I take to be at least one reason for the longstanding reluctance (by men and women) to believe women who say they have been raped or sexually harassed by seemingly normal, ordinary men. The reason has to do with the disturbing implications of acknowledging that such conduct has occurred. Disbelief in individual cases then functions as a form of denial across the board. In this post, I want to talk about a type of sexual harassment that has not been on the national radar lately but that is nonetheless a significant impediment to women's equality and to their sense of safety and wellbeing in the workplace.

by Neil H. Buchanan The repeal (or near-repeal) of the estate tax is by no means the largest part of the Republicans' tax plans, but it is at the philosophical core of their anti-tax efforts.  Understanding how and why Republicans insistently lie about the estate tax provides a window into their longstanding effort to reward the wealthy simply for being wealthy and to punish everyone else for not being virtuous enough to be rich. Untroubled by evidence and unencumbered by logic, the Republicans have been telling tall tales about the estate tax literally for decades.  Shamefully, many Democrats have bought into those lies, with the result that the estate tax is now a husk of what it should be.  Rather than full repeal, I suspect that the current political mess will leave an even smaller and less effective estate tax in place, thus allowing Republicans to continue to campaign against it -- and to continue to use it to raise funds from wealthy donors. No matter whether...

by Michael Dorf During the oral argument in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case , Solicitor General Noel Francisco repeatedly used the following hypothetical example to make the point that a baker's creation of a custom cake (regardless of whether it contains an articulate message) is speech: Could the government "compel an African American sculptor to sculpt a cross for a Klan service?", the SG asked. And if not, doesn't that show that sculpting for a ceremony to which one objects--whether the medium is wood for a cross or dough for a cake and whether the ceremony is a wedding or a cross-burning--is expression to which the compelled speech doctrine applies? The argument in the case was wide-ranging, with various outcomes possible. For at least some justices the case poses difficult line-drawing problems. But the SG's cross example does not do the work that he seems to think it does. Here I'll highlight three objections to it. One of them was offered during the ...

by Joseph Kimble       Several readers made thoughtful comments on my original post. They deserve equally thoughtful responses, which I’ll try to provide below.      The short references are to the two articles I cited in the original post, one in The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing and the other in the Wayne Law Review .      Most of the comments centered on the Wayne article about overrulings by the Michigan Supreme Court. (Reminder: the 81 overrulings by the Republican majority were 96.3% ideologically conservative.) Few readers addressed the evidence about Justice Scalia’s opinions in the Scribes article: 6 empirical studies (pp. 30–35) and 11 scholarly examinations (p. 35, note 96) that seriously militate against any claim that his textualism was nonideological, politically neutral, objective — the simple product of rule-of-law judging. How much evidence does it take to confirm what (in Prof. Dorf’s words ) is “blindingly obvi...

by Neil H. Buchanan I am not the only observer who was surprised that the Republicans managed to get out of their own way and actually pass two versions of a relatively large change to the U.S. tax system.  (What will happen as they try to agree on a final version is, of course, anyone's guess.)  I was not, however, especially surprised by the added degrees of shamelessness and dishonesty that the Republicans were willing to bring to their effort. After all, anyone who has been paying attention -- and who is not either a partisan Republican or a diehard believer that both parties are always equally to blame -- has seen this coming.  Each time a big policy debate has erupted over the past generation, the Republicans have outdone themselves and degraded our political system in ways that were once unthinkable.

by Neil H. Buchanan I have no idea why it still surprises me, but I am always amazed when conservatives who present themselves as the brave defenders of capitalism inadvertently reveal that they have absolutely no idea what capitalism is or how it works.  A serial offender is Donald Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who is now in the midst of a fight to take over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). As part of his public relations campaign, Mulvaney announced several days ago that Trump "wants me to get [the CFPB] back to the point where it can protect people without trampling on capitalism."  This is more than a bit odd, because Mulvaney has made it clear that he never thought the CFPB was at the point where it was not trampling on capitalism, and he and Trump clearly want to destroy the agency, not bring it back to some golden age of capitalism-friendly consumer protection. The big point that Trump and Mulvaney are making, after all, is that th...

by Michael Dorf Right-wing provocateur James O'Keefe and his organization Project Veritas were in the news this week, but not in the way that he hoped. O'Keefe sent a woman to talk to Washington Post reporters falsely claiming to have had an abortion as a teenager after she was impregnated by Roy Moore. Presumably, O'Keefe hoped that the Post would run the story, whereupon he would reveal that it was false, and this would show that: (a) the Post  has a liberal bias that leads it to cut corners when reporting negative news about conservatives; and therefore (b) prior WaPo reporting on Roy Moore's sordid sexual history is not credible. The Post foiled O'Keefe's plans by fact-checking the woman's story. When it did not check out, the Post did not run her false story, instead running the story of how O'Keefe tried to fool the Post . There the episode might have ended were it not for the fact that O'Keefe and his acolytes do not just run stings agains...

by Michael Dorf My latest Verdict column explores the reasons for the difference in reaction time to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other sexual misconduct in the private sector (thus far mostly Hollywood and the media) versus in government. I note that actors, directors, journalists, etc., have been meeting with swift termination, while elected officials have not been. I offer a couple of factors as key to the explanation of the disparity. First, polarization makes people likely to view both the seriousness and truthfulness of the allegations through a partisan lens. And second, even when people accept that "their guy" did the thing and it was bad, it is instrumentally rational to stick with your scoundrel if he will vote as you expect, rather than to jump ship in favor of an upstanding citizen of the rival party.

By Eric Segall Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear the case of the Colorado baker who refuses to allow his products to be used in same-sex wedding ceremonies or celebrations. Colorado courts found that his refusal violated a state law prohibiting vendors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. The baker, Jack Phillips, claims that the Colorado law, as applied to him, violates the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. This collision between anti-discrimination laws protecting gays and lesbians on the one hand and opponents of same-sex marriage on religious and free speech grounds on the other hand is the latest battle in the national culture wars.  Justices Gorsuch and Thomas both claim to be committed originalists. Since it is likely the four liberals on the Court will rule in favor of Colorado, one more vote for the State should result in its victory. How should a committed originalist decide this case? 

By William Hausdorff The glimmers of hope from the most recent state and local elections in Virginia and elsewhere paradoxically made me aware of how thick is the cloud of gloom that had descended on many of us since the previous US national election.   This gloom that has made many of us question, for the first time, the very resilience of the US political democracy. In trying to cope with this, Masha Gessen drew on her previous life in a gloomy environment in an excellent essay: …a decade and a half in Putin’s Russia taught me something about living in an autocracy. I am familiar with the ways in which it numbs the mind and drains the spirit.  In contrast, I have recently been pondering the Dementors described by J.K. Rowling in her Harry Potter books : Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air aro...

by Neil H. Buchanan The Republicans' attempt to sell their damaging and regressive tax plan is proceeding pretty much as one would expect.  They are making unsupportable economic claims while endlessly repeating an up-is-down-freedom-is-slavery-everything-will-be-different-this-time big lie, claiming that their proposals are all about improving the lives of middle class people.  This has become standard operating procedure for Republicans in the twenty-first century. Although we have long since become accustomed to most of this, we must constantly remind ourselves that it is a very sad state of affairs when we find ourselves saying, "Sure, one of the two major political parties cannot make an honest case even for its most fervently held policy goal, but what are you gonna do?"  Even so, at this point it would barely be worth writing yet another column on this topic if there were not some new aspect to the Republicans' relentless, pathological dishonesty. And as ...

by Michael Dorf As I noted here last week, on Monday, UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky delivered two lectures at Cornell on "Free Speech on Campus." He was thoughtful and erudite, and I say that because it's true, not only because Dean Chemerinsky said he agreed with everything I said in my preview blog post! I'm not going to try to recap everything Dean Chemerinsky said. Instead, I want to focus on what he described as a gray area: the scope of the obligation of government--including public universities like UC Berkeley--to pay the added safety costs associated with speakers with highly controversial views.

by Neil H. Buchanan The sudden wave of social acknowledgement of the ways in which men have long mistreated women is as unexpected as it is welcome.  We are in what seems to be a transformative moment in history, and we can only hope that it leads to a thoroughgoing change in men's behavior and everyone's expectations. By far the most ink has been spilled recently discussing U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore and his harassment (and worse) of underage girls when he was in his thirties.  I have nothing to add to that discussion, but I will note that Donald Trump's (mis)handling of the Moore mess includes this gem : "[White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee] Sanders said Thursday that Trump considers the allegations against Moore 'extremely troubling' but does not plan to rescind his endorsement and thinks that Alabama voters should be the ones to pick their next senator." Now, if Trump truly believed that Alabama voters should pick their next sena...

By Eric Segall Professors Randy Barnett and Akhil Amar had a fascinating, informative and entertaining debate at the Federalist Society Convention on Saturday. The question was "Resolved: Lochner Still Crazy after all These Years." I recommend you watch the entire debate, but I want to focus on what Barnett said at the very end. In response to a question concerning how far the legal academy has come in accepting the idea that maybe Lochner  wasn't all that bad, Barnett attributed the development to the Federalist Society's thirty-year commitment to pushing judges to adopt a textualist-originalist approach to constitutional interpretation. Barnett's explanation echoed the overriding theme of the conference, which was that finally textualist-originalist judges were being appointed to the bench. The White House counsel said at the convention, to everyone's delight, that "The Trump Administration's philosophy on judging can be summarized in two words: ...

by Michael Dorf On Monday Nov 20, UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will be giving two talks at Cornell on the topic "Free Speech on Campus," which happens to be the title of his new book with Howard Gillman. I'll introduce Dean Chemerinsky at the law school event and, following his talk, moderate a discussion. I expect to have something to say by way of post-mortem on Tuesday. In this essay, I want to make a preliminary observation about Dean Chemerinsky's topic and then offer some illustrations. My basic claim is that some free speech issues might be resolved differently in a college or university (what I'll call "campus") setting from how they might be resolved in general (what I'll call non-campus settings), but that the difference the campus setting makes depends on the question. In some contexts, the fact that speech claims are made on campus should make them stronger relative to competing claims; in other contexts, the fact th...

by Neil H. Buchanan A surprisingly large number of Republicans have announced their departures from Congress this year.  Including those who are retiring, resigning, and running for other offices, there are currently 25 members of the House who are either already gone or will not be back in January 2019.  Most are not well known.  More prominently, Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake are also quitting in disgust. This is more than a bit unusual, because it is usually the minority party that suffers big losses of experienced people.  Why stick around, especially in the majority-is-everything House, when you are in the minority and when there are no White House perks or photo ops to make your job exciting? But Republicans are leaving in droves.  I will leave it to others to ponder what this means about the majority party's leadership and Donald Trump.  My question today focuses on what the Republican leavers will say and do as they walk out the door....

by Michael Dorf My latest Verdict column asks whether the Justice Department is violating the First Amendment by conditioning its approval of AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner on divestiture of either DirecTV or Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of CNN. I conclude that there is probably enough prima facie evidence that the decision is in retaliation for CNN's "fake" (i.e., appropriately negative) coverage of Trump to justify discovery regarding subjective motivation should the issue end up in court. En route to that conclusion, I compare and contrast the legal approach that prevails in free speech and equal protection pretext cases, on one hand, with the legal approach that prevails in Fourth Amendment pretext cases. Here I want to explore a point that seems to be insufficiently appreciated: the existence and strength of what I'll call the "Free Speech and Equal Protection exclusionary rule."

by Neil H. Buchanan Imagine a world, not at all like our own, in which the Republican majorities in Congress had decided to update the tax code in a way that truly deserved to be called "reform." Rather than proceeding from the firm commitment that they must cut taxes on large corporations and the superrich ( especially the "lazy rich"), Republicans instead could have approached the tax code realistically and productively, noting that it must necessarily be complicated -- because life is complicated, and people want the tax code to take into account life's realities -- but doing everything that they can to repeal or change tax provisions that simply do not make sense. Again, that is most definitely not what Republicans are actually doing.  They have proposed a melange of unrelated changes to the tax code that will hit various groups of taxpayers, but this is only happening because Republicans imposed restrictions on themselves that required them to offset...

by Michael Dorf In light of the revelations and accusations that Kevin Spacey sexually harassed and/or assaulted various men and boys over the years, Netflix has suspended production of the upcoming season of House of Cards , in which Spacey has hitherto starred. Reportedly, the show's writers are attempting to write Spacey's character, Francis Underwood, out of the show. In the meantime, Netflix subscribers can still watch the existing five seasons. That is more than can be said for fans of comedian Louis CK, who admitted late last week that he had pressured women to view him naked. Women have alleged that CK masturbated in front of them; CK's apology  admits that he "showed them" his penis but does not specifically mention masturbating. In any event, the incompleteness of CK's apology does not seem to be at issue, because HBO acted before CK published it. Within a day of the initial revelations, HBO canceled upcoming projects with CK and also pulled CK...

By Eric Segall Justice Antonin Scalia lived a large life. There is no denying his remarkable ability to give speeches that dazzled those in attendance. His son Christopher Scalia and Ed Whelan have collected and published many of these speeches in their new book "Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well-Lived." These talks, given around the world, provide the reader a wonderful account of Scalia the person, the philosopher, and the judge. On just about every topic, small and large, with one major exception, Scalia entertains, informs and energizes. My perspective is the same as other reviewers on this point so I will not elaborate further on the positive aspects of most of these fine speeches. If the reader is looking for a strong justification for originalism in these speeches, however, she will be disappointed. The speeches on that topic, sadly, are cliche ridden, assume facts not in evidence, and most importantly, do not address the major issue many lega...

by Neil H. Buchanan As I write this column, Republicans in the U.S. Senate are doing their part to make sure that the debate about taxes becomes even more absurd and incomprehensible.  Not that that's a bad thing.  This whole process is a sham, and we would be much better off if they did nothing at all . And it might well come to that.  I continue to believe, however, that Republicans will flail about for several months but then cobble together something at the last possible moment before some self-imposed deadline.  Whatever they ultimately pass, they will call it "reform" and Donald Trump will call it "tremendous." Whatever emerges in the end will almost certainly be nearly unrecognizable compared to where they started.  In the meantime, I find it unfortunately necessary to pay attention to the process, because Republicans will stagger along and make some ad hoc and often accidental decisions that will somehow become accepted wisdom.  Path dependen...

by Sherry F. Colb In my column for this week , I discuss the topic of surrogacy in the context of a New York State bill under consideration that would legalize such arrangements and make them enforceable. My focus in the column is on the baby's interests and on the potential parents who wish to use surrogacy to expand their families. In this post, I want to look more closely at the woman who carries other people's babies, the surrogate herself. Why would those focusing on the woman wish to ban surrogacy?

by Michael Dorf The NYPD and other first responders were still tending to the dead and wounded late last week when the news that ISIS-inspired killer Sayfullo Saipov had come to the U.S. from Uzbekistan as a "diversity lottery winner" prompted President Trump to denounce the diversity lottery and to take a stab at NY Senator Chuck Schumer, despite Schumer's efforts to repeal the diversity lottery. Another day, another killing, another presidential debasement. Although pundits immediately observed the inconsistency between Trump's willingness to leap to policy action when Muslim immigrants kill versus his go-slow approach when white Christian Americans (more frequently) kill, that observation may be beside the point in this case. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and this time Trump may have fortuitously said something sensible. Yale law professor Peter Schuck, writing in the New York Times , followed his condemnation of Trump's characteristic factual e...

by Neil H. Buchanan Another day, another mass shooting that -- despite the seemingly endless gun violence that this country needlessly endures -- has a high enough body count to (for now) constitute front-page news. Barely anyone noticed any of the multiple shootings in the five weeks between the Las Vegas massacre and what was quickly labeled the Texas Church Shooting, but the body count in those killings totaled 29, which is three more than the current death toll in Sutherland Springs. We already know that there will still not be a real political debate about guns, and the people who continue to enable this carnage will return to their usual talking points about it being "too soon" to discuss policy and that the real problem is mental health (or something else, as long as guns have nothing to do with it). For now, therefore, it seems safe to assume that Donald Trump and the Republicans will continue to promote their paranoid, macho fantasies about how none of t...

by Neil H. Buchanan For months , I have been pointing out that Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have been offering "non-plans" to change the tax code.  Issuing press releases containing nothing more than vague bullet points -- yet somehow also making it clear that their ultimate plan would be hugely regressive -- the ruling party promised that the final plan would deliver on their years of promises of fundamental tax reform. Well, the House's plan is now in, and it is ... not tax reform.  It is a hugely regressive tax cut, but unless there is a new definition of "reform" such that that word now means "change in various uncoordinated and unprincipled ways," then this is not tax reform, and it is certainly does nothing to fundamentally change the nature of the tax system.

by Michael Dorf In my latest Verdict column , I criticize the federal government's argument defending its initial refusal to permit a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant to temporarily leave federal custody for an abortion at private expense on the ground that thus releasing her would render the government complicit in the abortion. I explain that this is an extravagant view of complicity but that the government could be excused for thinking it might succeed because a similarly extravagant view of complicity might well have succeeded in the litigation challenging the exemption procedures from the Obamacare contraception mandate had the case not ultimately been resolved via a more or less forced settlement. There, the plaintiffs argued that having to ask for an exemption from the obligation to provide contraception insurance would itself implicate them in the provision of contraception insurance that would ultimately be provided by others. In the column, I liken that argument to th...

By Eric Segall How people research and write about law has changed dramatically during the course of my academic career. Twenty years ago, although there was an abundance of relevant scholarship on most hard legal questions, there were reasonable ways of dealing with the quantity of relevant work. Today, there is virtually no way to keep up with the avalanche of high-level scholarly output devoted to most legal topics and current cases.

by Michael Dorf When the news broke yesterday that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates had been indicted, speculation almost immediately turned to the question whether Manafort and Gates--and/or George Papadopoulos, another Trump advisor--would offer dirt on Trump in exchange for leniency. Trump channeler/ potty-mouthed newly-former Twitterer Roger Stone and Trump lawyer Ty "Not that Ty Cobb" Cobb tried to throw cold water on the idea, saying that Manafort has no damaging information to share about Trump. Maybe not, but the fact that Stone and Cobb say something is--how to put this?--not exactly irrefutable evidence of that something. Certainly the concerted efforts of Trumpologists to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller as biased because he is a professional acquaintance of fired FBI Director James Comey suggests that Trumpworld is not simply counting on the truth. Rather, the efforts to paint the longtime Republican wi...

by Neil H. Buchanan Is there common ground between American liberals and some subset of the people who identify themselves as conservatives?  That is, are there meaningful issues on which -- were it not for the existence of a malignant narcissist in the White House -- something resembling middle-of-the-road reasonableness might prevail? Sadly, we know the answer to this question when it comes to elected Republicans.  In my two most recent columns, I explained that there are no "moderate" Republicans in public office (and certainly not in the U.S. Senate, which is where America's most clueless pundits are sure that moderate Republicans most assuredly can be found), and I also argued that there are not even any "principled" or "reasonable" Republican officeholders, much less moderate ones. It is true that a tiny number of Senate Republicans have recently taken a stand against the way Donald Trump conducts himself as president, which is a good...

by Michael Dorf Acting before the Department of Justice could seek an emergency stay from the Supreme Court, an undocumented minor known in court papers as Jane Doe received an abortio n just a day after the en banc US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the federal government could not continue to block her from doing so. Judge Millett's concurring opinion provides the chief rationale for the ruling, which was an otherwise unexplained per curium order. It is a remarkably thorough opinion, given the tight time constraints. In a Verdict column next week, I intend to discuss one of the arguments that the government offered  in its opposition to en banc review: the notion that permitting Doe to receive an abortion, even at private expense, would make the government complicit in the abortion, which the Trump administration opposes on moral grounds. I shall explain that while this is an unprecedentedly extreme view of complicity, it is the next logical step in a rat...

by Neil H. Buchanan There is no question that moderation has died in the Republican Party, especially among those in the U.S. House and Senate.  From the environment to gun safety to women's rights to economic inequality to judicial appointments, congressional Republicans continue to vote in lockstep to pass an agenda that would make even Ronald Reagan cringe. Recent events, however, have raised hopes that some of those extremely conservative Republicans will begin to act differently.  Might some, including those who are retiring -- the two most celebrated being Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake -- at last be willing to buck the party line and vote against the most extreme policies that their leaders have (since long before Donald Trump came along) been forcing down the country's collective throat? Not a chance.  The underlying policy situation has not changed, with Republicans in Congress moving forward on their extreme agenda no matter what their feelings are ab...

by Michael Dorf Watching the well-deserved fall of Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, and other public figures who paid large sums to settle lawsuits for sexual harassment (and possibly worse), one can't help but think about the Groper in Chief: If a pattern of sexual harassment makes a man unfit to run a movie studio or to serve up daily doses of right-wing tripe on FoxNews, why didn't the Access Hollywood tape and the credible accusations of a dozen gropees sink Donald Trump's presidential campaign? The conventional answer over the last year or so has been a variant on Trump's Fifth Avenue Conjecture. Trump famously said "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." People who supported Trump, the conjecture goes, knew he wasn't a saint but didn't care. They were in the tank for him, warts and all. Undoubtedly there's something to that, but I want to propose a more radical--and more ...

by Neil H. Buchanan Note to readers: I have lightly edited this column at approximately 9:10pm on October 24 to incorporate the news of Senator Jeff Flake's surprise announcement that he will not run for reelection next year. America's pundit class is terrified of the idea that there are no more moderates in American politics.  More accurately, the typical pundit (from moderate left to moderate right) is concerned that there seem to be no moderate Republicans left standing. Simply recognizing this new reality would be threatening to the typical mainstream political writer, however, because admitting what has happened would make it necessary to saying something unacceptable: the two parties are not equally wrong about everything.  Because admitting that out loud is forbidden, these arbiters of political good taste both refuse to see moderation among Democrats and imagine moderation among Republicans. Supposedly, polarization in both parties is driving all of our problem...

by Sherry F. Colb Here is an open letter to the author of a recent essay on Above The Law : Dear Mr. Mystal: I had occasion last week to read your Above The Law essay, “Columbia Law Vegans Are Probably Discriminated Against, And I Assume Delicious.”  It was quite disappointing, and I feel inspired to explain why. Let me start by referencing the caption for the photograph at the beginning of the essay. It features a group of vegetables like corn and zucchini, and the caption reads “Would you kill me if I was able to look sad?” This is the only reference—and a rather oblique one, at that—to what might be motivating vegans to take upon ourselves “self-imposed ‘dietary restrictions.’” The caption suggests that vegans avoid animal products because animals “look sad” when they’re being slaughtered. Beyond this caption, if one were learning about vegans for the first time from your essay, one could be forgiven for concluding that we have no reason at all to refrain from eating and...

by Neil H. Buchanan The sales job for the White House's non-plan to change the tax system is not going well, by all accounts.  As usual, Donald Trump's lack of focus has distracted everyone, as he flits from one personal feud to another and circles back around to his obsessions with destroying the health care system and building his expensive and pointless wall. Even so, I stand by my prediction that at some point Trump and the Republicans will pass something that -- no matter how limited or small it is -- they will call "sweeping tax reform," and the supposedly hostile press will play along. After all, this is a group of people who held a Rose Garden celebration merely because they managed to pass a (terrible) health care bill through one house of Congress.  Imagine their victory lap even if they have done nothing more than, say, change the exclusions for the Alternative Minimum Tax or the depreciation rules for capital investment?  Imagine the lies that th...

By Eric Segall This week ProPublica issued a report with the headline "It's a Fact, Supreme Court Errors aren't Hard to Find." The group reviewed "dozens of cases" and said that it found a "number of false or wholly unsupported claims." Examples included erroneous voter registration rates in Chief Justice Robert's Shelby County decision striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act; an unsupported conclusion by Justice Alito about the percentage of American companies that require background checks for its workers similar to the ones used for federal employees; and Justice Kagan's statements about the reliability of drug sniffing dogs in an important Fourth Amendment case. ProPublica claimed in the report to review 83 randomly selected opinions over a five year period and found assertions of "legislative facts" in 24 of those cases. The group alleged that seven of those opinions, more than 25%, contained false or unsuppo...

by Michael Dorf My latest Verdict column asks whether a federal ban on bump stocks would violate the Second Amendment. The short answer is no, but as I explain, the full answer is a bit more complicated. During the litigation that culminated in the 2008 SCOTUS ruling in DC v Heller , it was taken for granted by all the lawyers and justices that the federal ban on possession and transfer of machine guns made after 1976 is valid. Indeed, as I note in the column, Walter Dellinger, arguing for DC, labored to persuade the Court that machine guns are indistinguishable (for Second Amendment purposes) from other firearms and that therefore the Court ought not recognize an individual constitutional right under the Second Amendment. The ultimate opinion for the Court strongly hints in dicta that the machine gun ban is valid, but doesn't do a very good job of explaining why. My column argues that the actual test the Court announced for whether various types of weapons count as "arms...