Dorf on Law

In President Trump's second term, the Department of Justice has been illegally firing  and inducing the departure of many of its best lawyers. Although many competent lawyers remain, those that do are overworked. In addition, they must toe the line laid down by DOJ leadership who are happy to discard generations-old norms of independence to make the department into an instrument of the president's vindictive will. And to partially fill the depleted ranks, DOJ has been lowering its standards and raising the bar on ideological purity . Although that last link points to an article concerning the Civil Rights Division, the problem exists throughout DOJ. As a result of DOJ's competence deficit, it was hardly surprising to discover that in its two most recent high-profile lawsuits aiming to block states from exercising their constitutional powers to conduct congressional elections, the DOJ committed blunders. I mentioned one of these in passing in my Verdict column yesterday. Th...

Next Tuesday, and most assuredly for several months thereafter, the wheels of America's creaky constitutional democracy will -- through elections and a gazillion legal challenges thereto, all of which could be upended by military and paramilitary violence -- determine whether or not the Democratic Party will become the majority party in one or both houses of Congress.  And even if the Democrats ultimately take control, we will then have to wait and see whether Donald Trump will simply defy them at every turn. It is not a great situation to be in, but given how much worse I have long thought things would be by now, this is beyond the top of the range of possibilities that seemed possible only a year ago.  None dare call it optimism, but it is in the same area code. But if the Democrats do break the Republicans' full control of the federal government, the next question will be whether it will only be a fleeting victory, soon to be followed by an ugly restoration of the current s...

In July 2026, several AI agents, unleashed by OpenAI, hacked into servers of Hugging Face, a company that develops tools and datasets for machine learning. OpenAI set up a sandbox to test the capabilities of its AI models using tests created by Hugging Face. AI agents, tasked with completing exceedingly difficult tasks, decided to cheat by hacking the tester Hugging Face. The details of the hack were fascinating and frightening. It made clear to the world that AI agents are extraordinarily capable and highly difficult to control. This was old news to AI Safety researchers , who have been warning of the increasing capabilities of the top AI models, the difficulty in aligning them and controlling them, and the perils of failing to do so. Consider Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence , Toby Ord’s The Precipice , and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies . All make the compelling case that building highly capable AI without solving the extraordinarily difficul...

Because I am not teaching this semester, I tacked an extra week onto my fall break and have spent the last week and a half in Japan--partly touring in Tokyo and Kyoto but mostly on a bicycle tour that took me and the rest of the group through ancient Japan, beginning with Nara (where the deer are believed to be sacred and thus have the run of the town).  I've had a wonderful time and learned a great deal about Japanese history and culture, but, not wanting to come across like Thomas Friedman, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert of any sort based on a conversation with a taxi driver. Accordingly, I'm going to devote today's essay to reflecting on my own reaction to a particular experience I had at a Buddhist temple in Koyasan, which is home to over one hundred such temples and is the center of Shingon Buddhism, dating to the early 9th century. Along with the rest of my group, I stayed overnight at one of the monasteries in Koyasan. That was especially meaningful to ...

On Tuesday of this week, in " The Other Huge Election Issue: Taxing the Billionaires ," I wrote this about next month's US midterm elections: [B]eyond control of Congress, there are other fundamentally important matters to be determined at the ballot box, including state-level offices and referenda. From my perspective, by far the most important of those matters is whether the billionaire class will succeed in buying themselves out of being taxed, which they are trying to do by flooding the airwaves in certain states with anti-tax propaganda. California is one of the states in which voters will determine the fate of a wealth tax, so I then provided a link to my annual  Jotwell  column  ( The Billionaire Tax: Dispassionate Analysis of a Policy that We Desperately Need ), in which I summarized and endorsed four tax scholars' assessment of the anti-tax arguments that California's billionaires have been pushing relentlessly. While I would normally write a new  Dorf o...