Dorf on Law

Count Binface became an international phenomenon this past summer.  For those who are unaware, the Count is a "novelty candidate" who has used the UK's easy ballot access to run for a series of offices as an ongoing publicity stunt.  Interestingly, the man behind Count Binface is a British comedian who happens also to have a classics degree from Oxford, which means that his political persona is both hilarious and unexpectedly well informed. In the "About Me" section of the Count's website , he helpfully explains that I’m an intergalactic space warrior and leader of the Recyclons from planet Sigma IX. I came to Earth in 2017 and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May (as ‘Lord Buckethead’), going went viral (in a non-Covid way). Then in 2018, after an unfortunate battle on the planet Copyright, I rewspawned [sic] in my true form as Count Binface to take on Boris Johnson in the 2019 election, where I scored a surprising 69. In 2021, I received 92,896 votes ...

Critiques of judicial supremacy and proposals limiting the Supreme Court's power are common on the left side of the legal academy these days. For most of the last sixty years, similar calls to control the Court came from conservatives upset about the liberal decisions of the Warren and early Burger Courts. Even during the Rehnquist Court era, from 1986-2006, most scholars on the American left were willing to roll the dice on the Supreme Court largely due to scholars like Laurence Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Akhil Amar, among many others, who came of age in the shadow of the Warren Court. But with the Roberts Court erasing many of the most important liberal decisions of the last 60 years and instituting a Republican Party list of priorities on the country, serious institutional critiques of the Court now come almost exclusively from liberals and progressives.  Given the political nature of constitutional law, this academic role reversal should not surprise anyone. We like to think...

Last week, Professor Dorf reminded us of "the risk of getting distracted by the relatively inconsequential nonsense emanating from Trump and his administration."  The day before, I wrote a column in which I focused on one of the most important issues of our time -- the Trump regime's dystopian deportation system -- writing that "at the very least, it is clear that the US is acting in ways that we once would have described as only imaginable under an authoritarian regime like China's."  Agreeing with the point that Professor Dorf would make the next day, I added: People like me follow the minutiae of US news cycles, and we chase shiny objects like Trump's failing health, his obviously false promise to pay people $5000 each if Republicans win the midterms, his obsession with erecting monuments to himself, and so on.  But while all of those stories are important in their own ways, the touchstone when assessing the current government should be that the US ...

To the relief of Greenlanders, Danes, and everyone who counts on NATO's continued existence, on Tuesday President Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen signed a three-party agreement that effectively and, by its terms, permanently, resolves the crisis Trump precipitated by his threats to use any means, including military force, to seize control of Greenland. As has been widely reported (e.g., here ), the agreement falls well short of the "ownership" Trump claimed that the United States needed in order to ensure the national security advantages of a military presence in Greenland. Indeed, it is hardly clear that the agreement represents any significant change from the status quo ante. So, naturally, the White House is touting the deal as a "historic," "unprecedented," and "landmark agreement" that "comes at no cost to American taxpayers." No cost, that is, except for the ...