Dorf on Law

A recent article in The New York Times examined the firing (or more politely, the "departure") earlier this year of Ben Sasse, the former US Senator from Nebraska.  Sasse had just a year earlier resigned his Senate seat after he was almost inexplicably hired as President of the University of Florida's flagship campus in Gainesville (UF).  " A Star President’s Resignation Was a Mystery. Was It All About Rankings? " was the work of Stephanie Saul. Saul writes with penetrating insight about higher education in the United States, and her work is always thorough and fair.  (And to be clear, I would say that even if her reporting on my own situation at UF had not played a prominent part in an article that she wrote last December.)  Indeed, she is one of the best of a dwindling number of reasons to continue to subscribe to The Times .  Her recent article is especially useful in two ways. First, the central question in the article is the degree to which UF's manic...

These days with the Supreme Court acting like the Republican Court, I often think about the chain of evnts that led me to become a hard core legal realist. I wrote about this part of my career once before but thought I'd revisit the question as I approach my late 60's and my career is winding down a bit. I was not a legal realist before I reported to work at the United States Department of Justice in the fall of 1987. I did have dinner with my closest friends the evening before who had previously been surprised I decided to work for the Bush Administration, given my liberal politics. I knew several people working in the Federal Programs Branch where I was heading, and they told me they rarely worked on political cases. I told my friends that I would not work on abortion or separation of church and state cases (as a matter of policy I am a strict separationist), but I could manage the rest.  I was assigned two cases my first day on the job. One of them, of course, was a major F...

Although Thanksgiving is still three days away, friends and family have been wishing me a happy Thanksgiving for nearly a week already, so, in the holiday spirit, I've decided to get the ball rolling with some reportage from the front in the perennial War on Christmas. But first some background. So long as there has been a Fox News, there has been a "War on Christmas"--that is, a claim by the Fox News hosts and ostensible journalists that there is a concerted effort among secular/liberal/coastal-elite politicians/journalists/ordinary-citizens to prevent devout Christians from expressing their faith in public. The standard move is to hype some supposedly outrageous anecdote, which might be real or could be highly distorted and exaggerated but in any event is highly unusual, and discuss it ad nauseam as though it is the tip of a secular spear aimed at religion in general and traditional forms of Christianity in particular. Because I don't watch Fox News, I can't say...

For quite some time, I have been highlighting the Republican Party's eagerness to rule the United States as a one-party, minoritarian autocracy.  (For one relatively recent example, see here .)  With Donald Trump winning the popular vote this time, does that change the story?  No.  Not for the presidency, and certainly not for the rest of the government.  That matters for many reasons, but before I get there, I will first update some of the key numbers that I summarized in a Dorf on Law column ten days ago. In 2020, everyone was told in advance that, because of the order in which some key states count votes, the early results would favor Trump but the later voting would favor Biden.  That is in fact what happened, and Trump then spent four years whining about "massive dumps" of votes at 3am that proved in his mind that something fishy was happening.  This time, the later-counted votes will not change the overall result, but because California is the...

Last week, Professor Stephen Sachs, the Antonin Scalia Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, gave the annual Judge Bork lecture at the Federalist Society's national conference. Scalia, Sachs, and Bork--so much originalism all in one place, all at one time, and of course the Federalist Society was the epicenter of it all. There was a lot of news last week coming out of the Federalist Society's annual event. Judge Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit took the occasion to personally and inaccurately insult Professor Steve Vladeck, partly by reading a handful of tweets which did not support her criticisms. The moderator, Judge Ho, certainly enjoyed and supported that awful display. I wrote not too long ago about lower court judges acting badly , and here were two more unfortunate examples. Then there was that hater of all things regulatory, Professor Phillip Hamburger of Columbia, toasting   the Court's efforts to dismantle the administrative state along with two Trump-nominate...

In the public mind, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is most closely associated with the anti-vax movement. That's completely understandable. During RFK Jr.'s short-lived and quixotic independent presidential run, he rarely brought up his anti-vax stance, but his long history of spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy and safety naturally led to questions from reporters about whether he has moderated his views. He hasn't. Thus, and again understandably, now that Donald Trump has announced RFK Jr. as his choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), attention has focused on how he might use the powers of the office to undermine vaccination efforts. While RFK Jr. has disclaimed any interest in preventing people from receiving existing vaccines, there is good reason to believe that he would slow development of new ones (including desperately needed new ones for the increasingly alarming strain of bird flu that has made its way to mammals, including humans) a...

In my Dorf on Law column last Tuesday, I argued that the people who voted for Trump this year -- as well as, crucially, the people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home rather than vote against Trump in 2024 -- should not be condescended to as if they are children who were "understandably" acting out against the world because they were upset about the economy (even though the US economy is, for the time being, in great shape), or whatever.  Sadly but predictably, however, this is exactly how non-Republican commentators have now chosen to distract themselves.  Do not hold voters responsible for their own actions in ushering in the new age of fascism.  Do not even blame Republicans.  Blame Democrats for being too much and too little, all at once. Why?  As one reader put it to me in an email after reading my column, millions and millions of the American "people saw Trump as an outlet for their hate, bigotry, misogyny, and racism.  [T]he Democrat's ...