Dorf on Law

To be clear, the bill that congressional Republicans dutifully passed and that Donald Trump signed on the country's nominal birthday last Friday was bad.  Very bad.  It seems safe to say that dooming tens of millions of people to needlessly early and painful deaths is bad.  In fact, I would venture to say that it is not good, because it is a massive upward redistribution of wealth, with health care and food assistance being taken away from the non-rich in order to partially fund a massive tax cut for the richest Americans and large corporations.  Yes, it is literally taking medicine away from sick people and food away from babies to make billionaires richer.  (And I do mean literally , not in the silly "my head literally exploded" non-sense but in the "this is in fact what will happen" sense.) So again: both bad and not good.  The problem is that there is a sloppy and misleading way to describe what is bad about that bill, and unsurprisingly, it involv...

As I explained here on the blog yesterday , from today through Sunday, I'm attending Vegan Summerfest. In yesterday's essay, I provided the descriptions of each of the talks I'll be giving and went into some detail about the first one (which I'll deliver later today), titled Free Speech for Animals . As promised, in today's essay I discuss my other talks. For those of you who missed yesterday's essay and don't want to click over to it, I'll provide the official description of each before diving in to a brief further exegesis of what I hope to accomplish. Human Rights for Nonhuman Animals : The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has played a critical role in efforts to combat grave injustices, including torture, genocide, and enslavement. But why should rights against such practices be restricted to human beings? Let’s explore whether, and if so, how, “human rights” can be a basis for securing rights for non-human animals. The genesis of this talk...

From tomorrow afternoon through Sunday, I'll be attending Vegan Summerfest , held on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. As I noted last year , this is an annual conference I've been attending fairly consistently for nearly two decades now. In that post from last year, you can find descriptions of talks I've given in the past. This year, I'm giving three and a half brand new talks. I say three and a half because three of them are solo talks, while the fourth is a session I'm jointly running with philosopher Mylan Engel . (In the program , that fourth talk is listed under Professor Engel's name only because he submitted the proposal, so, even though I was named therein, the computer thought it was a solo performance.) Below, I provide the description from the program of each of my talks and then say a bit more about the first one, putting it in context with a seminar I'll be offering at Cornell Law School in the fall. In a follow-up post ...

As readers of this blog probably know, I was extremely fortunate to have a close relationship with retired judge Richard Posner, including hours of on the record taped conversations (it is common knowledge that he tragically now suffers from severe Alzheimer’s). I was recently listening to one of our discussions about the Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor cases. We discussed both after his court rejected Notre Dame's absurd argument that signing a form granting it an exemption from the Affordable Care Act's requirement to provide birth control for its employees constituted a substantial burden on religion. We got into the weeds of free exercise and RFRA doctrine, or I should say, I tried to engage him in that conversation, but he refused. I was trying to show him that Justice Alito in Hobby Lobby effectively reduced substantial burden claims to non-reviewable sincerity claims, a point Justice Ginsburg made in dissent. I argued Alito’s move was deceitful and wrong. ...

Say anything to take power.  Do everything to hold power.   That is effectively the mantra of a rising dictator.  And in the United States today, on the eve of the annual Independence Day celebrations, the verb tense has now changed from "rising" to "risen."  In a conversation earlier today, a friend said, "People talk about whether there's a constitutional crisis.  That's no longer the question, because ...." and I finished the sentence, "we're already in post-constitutional mode." Given my decade-long series of analyses concluding that the US would soon no longer be a constitutional republic governed by laws and not men and with institutions guaranteeing ordered liberty, this is hardly surprising.  My friend and I both agreed, however, that this happened much,  much  more quickly than we expected -- and we honestly thought that we had long been on the outer boundaries of pessimism.  Oh well. How do we know that that fundamental chan...

In 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat) took to the most important media form of the day (radio) to castigate the Supreme Court for blocking many of his New Deal programs designed to ease America out of the Great Depression. He argued that the justices had to be replaced by younger ones more attuned to current economic problems. He said that we needed to “save the Constitution from the Court.” Soon thereafter, Justice Owen Roberts, a Republican, changed his mind in a few important cases (often called the “switch in time that saved nine”), and FDR’s plan was no longer needed. Less than twenty years later, a Supreme Court that had nine Democrats stopped President Harry Truman (a Democrat) from seizing the nation’s steel mills in what he called a national emergency in one of the most important cases in American history. Since that time, and until quite recently, the United States Supreme Court has, to varying degrees, issued decisions both parties could celebrate...

Supreme Court Justices have an unfortunate tendency to pretend that difficult issues are easy. Both Justice Barrett's majority opinion and Justice Sotomayor's dissent in Trump v. CASA, Inc . commit this sin. (For ease of presentation, I'll focus on the majority and the main dissent, but the same could be said for the other opinions, as well.)  The case asked whether district courts had overstepped in issuing nationwide injunctions halting the implementation and enforcement of President Trump's birthright citizenship Executive Order . That Executive Order purports to deny U.S. citizenship to persons born in this country (A) if the person's mother was unlawfully present in the U.S. and the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, or (B) if the person's mother's presence in the U.S. was lawful but temporary and the person's father was not a U.S. citizen or permanent lawful resident. Plaintiffs argued that the E.O. violated the Fourteenth...

I'll start by giving credit where credit is due. In Mahmoud v. Taylor , Justice Alito, writing for the majority, rejects the defendant school board's contention (echoed by the dissent) that the LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum merely "exposes" students to ideas that were inconsistent with the religious views of their parents. A fair assessment of the books and the guidance makes clear that the school board aims to instruct students on the importance of treating LGBTQ+ persons with respect and dignity. And now I'm done giving Justice Alito and the majority credit. They get one thing right. And it wasn't even an important thing, as Justice Alito himself says that it's not essential to distinguish between exposure and instruction, as either could substantially burden religion. Meanwhile, as I'll now explain, apart from getting that one apparently unimportant thing right, the majority got the important stuff wrong. Let's start with the biggest thing. The op...

Much will no doubt be written (perhaps including more thoughts from me) about today's SCOTUS ruling in Trump v. CASA . Headline writers predictably will--indeed already have--tell the public that the Supreme Court expressed a favorable view on the merits of the Trump administration's executive order restricting birthright citizenship, even though the Court specifically disclaims any view on the merits. In today's column, I raise two questions: (1) Is the decision ideological? (Answer: yes). (2) Is the decision practically important, given the workaround suggested in Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence? (Answer: probably yes, given doubts about whether the workaround will work.) (1) There will be some gnashing of teeth over whether the decision is ideologically based. It's true that the upshot of the ruling is to limit the ability of federal district courts to constrain the Trump administration, but as the majority opinion of Justice Barrett and the concurrences illustra...