Dorf on Law

Today is Election Day. If I lived in a state in which elections are conducted primarily by mail , I almost certainly would have mailed in my ballot rather than attempted to vote in person. New York State is not such a state, although I have sometimes sought, received, and returned an absentee ballot. Effective a couple of years ago, New York has both absentee ballots--for which an excuse is required--and "Early mail" voting --for which no excuse is required. For either, one must request a mail-in ballot. Unlike some states, New York does not simply mail every registered voter a mail-in ballot. New York also has early in-person voting. If I lived in a district in which one can expect long lines at the polls, I certainly would have voted early. However, in the 18+ years I've lived in Ithaca, I've never had to wait more than a minute or two to vote at my local polling place (sometimes an elementary school, this year the lobby of a retirement home). And because there are ...

St. Mary Catholic Parish ("St. Mary") is a private school in Denver, Colorado that openly discriminates against LGBTQ families. Because St. Mary is a private school, nothing in the Constitution forbids it from admitting whomever it pleases or requiring its students and families to adhere to its religious teachings. And nothing in this blog post should be interpreted by anyone to suggest any justification for coercive governmental intervention into the discriminatory policies of St. Mary or any other private religious school (unless the school accepts public money). But what St. Mary does on its own dime is different from how the government spends taxpayer dollars. Yet tomorrow, St. Mary will argue to the United States Supreme Court that Colorado violated the Free Exercise Clause by excluding it from a state-wide program that provides public money to participating pre-schools. Colorado law requires schools that want the state's money to agree not to discriminate on the bas...

Yesterday I was on SiriusXM with Dan Abrams, who has a law and politics podcast, talking about the two Dan Sullivans issue in Alaska and related issues. He was more focused than I would have chosen to be on the possibility of criminal prosecution but it was an otherwise useful conversation. It's now available via YouTube either by clicking this link or watching below.  Meanwhile, I created a little graphic to explain how the problem of same-name candidates emerges, given that it would be simple enough to prevent this sort of thing with a high threshold for ballot access in a two party system. (I "created" the graphic in the sense that I generated all of the steps and the text, but I used Claude to turn it into a graphic.) Here it is: Why Alaska's System Invites Same-Name Candidates Why Alaska's system creates an incentive for same-name candidates A chain of fixes, each solving one problem while opening the door to the next, ending with a tactic...

Yearly on this blog, Professor Buchanan writes a "Veganniversary" essay, the portmanteau of his own creation marking another year since he became a vegan. His first announcement of adopting a vegan lifestyle was in July 2008 , which was a little less than two years after I became a vegan. I am less able to pinpoint the exact date for me. I do know it was some time in the fall of 2006, meaning that I have recently passed or will soon pass my 20th veganniversary. To mark the occasion, I offer some observations. When people learn how long I've been vegan, they often say that it must be easier now than it was 20 years ago. That's true in one sense they mean and one that they don't. The sense in which they mean the point is that there are many more items in grocery stores and at restaurants (even in some unexpected places) that are and are clearly marked as vegan (or plant-based) now than there were then. Even so, 2006 was pretty far along in the movement. Donald Watso...

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...