Dorf on Law

Dolly Parton died two weeks ago.  Gloria Steinem's passing came a week later.  Both were admirable, powerful, and unique women who made indelible marks on important civil rights issues.  And if my words seem to massively understate the importance of their lives and work, I can only plead guilty.  Words do sometimes fail us all. Rather than writing general remembrances or half-informed biographies of either of these women, I will use this column today to comment on some notable aspects of their profound social impacts.  And although I am more than a bit uncomfortable doing so, I should note up front that my discussion of Steinem's legacy will include a genuine disagreement with a person with whom I almost never disagreed. First, Dolly Parton.  As many have commented, she somehow lived through one of the most divisive times in American history, when no one is universally liked (or even tolerated), yet everyone loved her.  Genuinely.  She...

In order to promote competition, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has a salary cap. Its rules (which are adopted as part of collective bargaining between the team owners and the players' union), are very complicated but the key point for purposes of today's discussion is that there are caps on both individual salaries and total team salaries. There are also anti-circumvention rules. As basketball fans undoubtedly know, the Los Angeles Clippers were recently given a very severe penalty for violating those anti-circumvention rules by using third parties to funnel millions of dollars beyond the official salary to their star player Kawhi Leonard. In saying the penalty is severe, I am not referring to the financial penalty. Leonard was fined $700,000, and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer was fined $30 million. But Leonard's salary for last season was about $50 million, so his fine amounted to less than 1.5% of one year's salary. Ballmer, meanwhile, is a co-founder of Mi...

Given my background and interests, I typically do not find myself writing columns about politics in Germany, and certainly not about German state elections.  As of this week, however, everyone must start to pay attention, because the neo-Nazi party that has been growing in popularity there (known as the AfD) won a key election in a state in the former East Germany.  The party did fall short of a majority, but the outcome is shaking European politics to its core. I will have much to say below about lessons from the German election for all of us in the United States, but I should first provide a bit of essential context.  To begin, why is the outcome worrying leaders across Europe rather than in Germany alone?  After all, despite the existence of the European Union, countries on that continent maintain their own unique and independent political systems.  Unfortunately, however, what the French have called the cordon sanitaire -- a commitment by non-ex...

In my Verdict column on Monday, I explained why a lawsuit under the Administrative Procedure Act by either New York State or a business that faces financial harm could succeed in blocking the official changing of the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. In an accompanying blog post that same day, I responded to counter-arguments that I anticipated the government would make if faced with such a lawsuit. Today I follow up by explaining that a lawsuit is now ripe and would be even stronger than I originally suggested. As I noted in the Verdict column, when the Secretary of the Interior and the Board of Geographic Names (BGN) changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, they failed to give effect to any of the considerations that, by law, it is supposed to take into account. Instead, they relied on a BGN policy that exempts geographic names chosen by the President from the ordinary procedures and considerations. However, the BGN had no authority to adopt a policy that ...

According to a former US Justice Department lawyer in a whistleblower disclosure, the Trump Administration's attacks on American colleges and universities over alleged antisemitism were "rushed and incomplete or ... failed to establish legal violations by the schools."  As reported by AP : The complaint alleges that the investigations into some of the nation's most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were "predetermined, without regard to the evidence" in a "politically mandated effort" to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges. I know, we are all shocked, shocked that there is dishonesty going on here.  These are serious matters, of course, and the problem is in fact much larger, because although the whistleblower is surely correct th...

In Monday's per curiam opinion in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation , the 5-4 majority said that a setback to an aesthetic interest in observing historic sites (such as the White House before Trump took his wrecking ball to it) is not a sufficient injury to confer Article III standing on an individual or group of which that individual is a member. The dissent by Chief Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court's three Democratic appointees argued that the per curiam misapplied the Court's standing precedents, especially Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife . The dissent is correct. The  Lujan Court said that indefinite plans to visit a region in the hope of observing members of an endangered species are not a sufficient interest under Article III but, citing earlier cases upholding standing for environmental plaintiffs, the Lujan  Court acknowledged that someone with a particular professional or other interest in an animal species would have standing to...

I taught in US colleges and universities for my entire 43-year career (with some visiting gigs in Canada and other not-America places along the way).  I am politically progressive.  Did I indoctrinate my students and change their political views to mirror mine?  Not even close, nor did my colleagues (including my conservative colleagues).  Even so, the unshakable belief that "liberal universities" are poisoning the minds of the young is an article of faith on the political right. The drumbeat of panicky accusations against professors is omnipresent, but despite its stale familiarity, it is ever more important to push back against this disinformation at a time when the Trump White House is in full-on attack mode against American higher education.  Here, I will have some fun with a particularly silly version of anti-university sanctimony from a Trump cabinet secretary and a  New York Times  columnist, followed (starting in Part 2 of this column la...