Dorf on Law

Guest Essay by  Alyssa King In the previous installments in this series ( here and here ), I described dangers to the independence and effectiveness of the federal courts, including attempts to change who hears the cases and interference with working conditions (anything from cutting off library access to direct physical threats). In this final essay, I consider how judges and lawyers can protect the federal courts as an institution. What is to be Done? Judges and chambers staff can prepare now for many of the threats I have outlined, reducing the risk that inevitable attacks on their impartiality and integrity will stick. US lawyers can provide support for judicial independence by insisting, loudly and repeatedly and in ways that cost us money, on our professional standards and on the version of judicial independence necessary to a free and democratic society in the common law legal tradition. Those outside the United States can also play a role. A. In Chambers The new  Judi...

Guest Essay by  Alyssa King In yesterday’s first installment in this series, I located the Trump administration’s assault on the courts and the bar in the tradition of authoritarian consolidation of control of legal institutions. I then described methods by which authoritarians ensure that legal challenges to their actions go before friendly judges: hiring friends, firing enemies, and altering jurisdiction. Today I focus on how working conditions shape judges’ ability to discover, and effectively respond to, illegal government action. These issues range from the deceptively benign—all the good faith and experience in the world is sometimes little match for a computer that will not turn on—to the overt threats.  Difficult Working Conditions The judiciary is a bureaucracy and as a bureaucracy is vulnerable to the same techniques—hiring and funding freezes, cancelled contracts, and lockouts—that are currently causing harm to so much of the non-partisan executive branch. Judges a...

Guest Essay by Alyssa King A month ago, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way published an insightful argument that the US is veering towards a competitive authoritarian   regime .     By some accounts, it is a personalized,   patrimonial   government. DOGE is also reminiscent of   Leninist   party-state structures in which Party positions and internal rules and directives run parallel to “official” ones. It is not entirely clear what type of government Trump and/or Musk are trying to build; they may not know themselves. What is clear is that the federal courts are at risk and with them the US reputation for maintaining not only democracy but also the rule of law.   Authoritarian regimes have many ways to curb the power of independent judges without directly altering the structure of the judiciary, judges’ pay, or judicial ethics rules. The US administration is engaging in many of these actions, and the world has started to take notice. As an American ...

Today's entry in my "Wait, Can He Actually Do That?" series differs from the usual fare in three ways.  (1) It doesn't include that rhetorical question in the title. The title instead poses a different question: "Is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Proposal to Eliminate Federal Judgeships Constitutional?" (2) The "He" in "Wait, Can He Actually Do That?" today refers to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, not to President Donald Trump. Indeed, because the question concerns the power of Congress, perhaps today's entry should refer to "They," not "He." (3) Today's entry does not appear here on the blog but instead in my latest Verdict column, available here . I have nonetheless decided to include it in the series and give it a number (12) because the proposal is of a piece with other moves by Trump and his allies to violate longstanding norms and very likely also to violate the Constitution.

We are only a few weeks into the second Trump presidency, and it is already quite clear that the confluence of interests that has put the Silicon Valley Ideology in the White House is rapidly—and chaotically—dismantling the political, economic, legal, and social institutions and structures that have held this country together as a democratic republic. Our failure to recognize and take seriously the Silicon Valley Ideology has led us to this moment, and things will only get worse if we continue to ignore or, even worse, decide to accept it as our nation’s new guiding philosophy. In 1997, as a great wave of technological optimism was beginning to crest, Langdon Winner was invited to share his thoughts on our bright tech future at the Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery and held at Erasmus Universiteit in Rotterdam. Winner, a political theorist known for his critical studies of science, technology, and culture, was p...

As reported over the weekend in The Chronicle of Higher Education , University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson reached an agreement with Education Secretary Linda McMahon that would restore the $175 million in funding the Trump administration withheld on the ground that Penn was not excluding transgender female athletes from women's sports . Jameson has agreed "in principle" to rename the institution the University of Trumpsylvania. Trump then posted on Truth Social :  I AM HONORED THAT THE WARTHON SCHOOL, WHICH I GRADAUTED FROM AND IS THE BEAST IN THE WORLD, IS GOING TO BE PART OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TRUMPSYLVANIA. THE FEDERRAL $$$ WILL NOW START FOWLING TO THIS GREAT COLLAGE. Renaming the university founded by Benjamin Franklin to restore "only" $175 million in federal funds might seem like a bad deal for the University Formerly Known As Penn (UFKAP). After all, Penn renamed its medical school  upon receiving $225 million in 2011. Adjusted for inflati...

Last week, I teased yet another column about the Democrats' internal battles in the aftermath of Senator Chuck Schumer's wise refusal to give the Musk-Trump Administration the gift of a government shutdown, parenthetically offering this: "Side note: I will be returning again to the ongoing Schumer fallout on Monday."  Those waters are still roiling even at this very moment, but because I expect all of that unpleasantness (unfortunately) to continue into the indefinite future, I am going to put that column off until next Monday at the earliest. Instead, I want to start to think today about two massive budgetary battles that will soon threaten the country, either one of which could be cataclysmic in its effects on the US and global economies -- to say nothing of the now-expected constitutional crises that they could trigger.  Perhaps surprisingly, the reason to think about these potential blowups now is related to the Democrats' intramural fight about the anti-shu...

Social Security happens to be one of my primary areas of academic expertise, and it unfortunately has become a focus of attention in the Musk-Trump Administration.  Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk seems to have heard from some bro somewhere that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, which has excited him.  (I can easily imagine him yelling "Ponzi!!" in the same way that he bellowed "Chainsaw!!" at a conference last month.)  My latest column on Verdict , published in two parts yesterday and today , addresses the latest madness. The idea that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme is an especially absurd example of financial illiteracy, as I explain (again) in Part One of today's column.  Part Two explains why Social Security is essential to the country and then points out that the program is almost shockingly inexpensive to run.  That is why the title of the column is: "Social Security is Essential, Efficient ( Gasp! ), and Definitely NOT a Ponzi Scheme." F...