Dorf on Law

My latest Verdict column assesses President Trump's proposal to use tariff revenue to fund $2,000 payments to Americans earning under $100,000. I chose to write about this topic now because last week Trump claimed, falsely, that payments of $1,776 to U.S. military service members were being funded by tariffs, when in fact the money comes from a supplemental housing fund appropriated by Congress as part of the "Big Beautiful Bill" it enacted over the summer. That fund is taken from general revenues, not from tariffs in particular. After parsing the legality of Trump's other plan to spend tariff revenue on rebates to the American public, I offer various reasons why it's a bad idea. Among those reasons is the reasonable likelihood that the Supreme Court will invalidate the tariffs as not authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. If so, and if rebate checks (or their refundable tax credit equivalent) have already gone out, that would create a fis...

With two weeks of holiday disruptions (and, one hopes, loads of joy and love) ahead of us, I expect this to be my last new  Dorf on Law  column of 2025.  I have decided to use this space to return to a topic that I discussed in two columns last month: " It Matters That the Extremely Close 2024 US Election Results Were Not Due to 'the Economy'" (November 4), and " 'Affordability Issues': Did Democrats Land on a Good Strategy for a Bad Reason? " (November 7). Why go back to what is in some ways the oldest of old news, with possibly nothing good to come from brooding over the whole mess yet again?  After all, no matter how it happened, Donald Trump ended up back in the Oval Office, and we are where we are today.  And "where we are" includes, for me, having only minutes ago received a "Here's to healthy holidays" email from Medicare, signed by ... Dr. Oz!!  Notably, he did not say Merry Christmas, so I guess the War on Christmas ...

This evening (from 6 to 8 pm Eastern time), I'll be giving a talk about birthright citizenship at the Tompkins County Public Library.  It also airs live on the library's YouTube channel and thereafter lives as a recording on the same page. Tonight's talk is part of the library's "Rights to Know" series. I gave another talk  in the series--on the Bill of Rights--earlier this fall. These talks are intended for a general audience, so regular readers of this blog might find them too basic for them. Nonetheless, as with all of my efforts to speak to non-lawyers, I try to provide sufficient background to make the subject matter comprehensible without dumbing down--to simplify without over-simplifying. Often when I write a blog post in anticipation of giving a lecture or speaking on a panel, I offer a summary of my remarks to help me formulate and organize them. I don't need to do so here because sent the library my PowerPoint slides, but I'll do so below b...

An undergraduate student at a US university contacted me recently with some interesting questions about the possibilities and benefits of tuition-free higher education in the United States.  In this unusually brief column, I will reproduce his questions and my answers, after which I will make a couple of short points that were inspired by my answer to one of the questions.   Question 1: Do you think that free college in America is possible? Me : Sadly, I don't. We're of course a wealthy enough country to do it, and we've done it in the not-too-distant past (1960's, 70's, and into the 80's), but the US's political situation makes it impossible. The Republicans were apoplectic about former President Biden's student loan partial forgiveness plan, which was quite minimalist.  I can't see how a national program of free higher ed stands a chance politically for the foreseeable future.   Question 2: College is free in other places like Germany, Norway and...

Per my usual custom around this time of year, I am posting the final exam I administered to my first-year students in constitutional law this past semester. Students had four hours to complete the exam, which was open-book but without access to the Internet or AI. Readers should feel free to take as much time as they wish and use whatever tools they find helpful! Question 1 (35%)             The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in  Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump  and  Trump v. V.O.S. , which present the question whether various tariffs President Trump has imposed are authorized by the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). The plaintiffs challenging the tariffs argue, among other things, that IEEPA provides the president with no tariff authority at all. Assume for purposes of this question that the Supreme Court agrees with that argument and rules 7-2 for the plaintiffs. Here is an exce...

In the tech world, the term vaporware is used to describe a product that does not yet and may never exist but that a company hypes for any number of reasons. For example, eventually, we will probably have a fully functional fleet of driverless cars, but Elon Musk has been promising that his Teslas will be fully self-driving in just another few years for a decade . Unless and until Tesla produces and sells such vehicles, its self-driving cars are vaporware. Meanwhile, three events in last week's news highlight how much of what Donald Trump does as president is the equivalent of vaporware. 1) Pardon? The most amusing incident was Trump's announcement that he was pardoning Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison for tampering with election machines in service of Trump's Big Lie during the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. It is not clear whether Trump merely announced an intention to pardon Peters or has actually...

For fans of American college football, this is the almost -empty weekend that sits between the end of the conference championship games and the beginning of the expanded playoff tournament.  As I put it in my most recent column on this topic (ten months ago), "I write one or two columns every year at the end of the season, usually offering a guilt-ridden confession that I continue to be fascinated by that brutal and corrupt sport, followed by some observations about the new ways in which the brutality and corruption are playing out." Although I prefer to wait until the end of the season to go through this ritual, the temptation to write such a column arrived early this year, for reasons that will become clear soon enough. [Before getting there, however, I should state up front that a major news story  emerged from the college football world this week, but that story is in an entirely separate category.  The now-former head coach of the University of Michigan's footb...

Note to Readers: This has been "a day," as the kids no longer say.  My usual response to unexpected chaos on a day when I am scheduled to write for  Dorf on Law is to (very reluctantly) run a Classic.  Today, however, I have an idea for a new column that I am particularly excited to share, which means that I am not going to be satisfied by simply posting a Classic and calling it a week. Therefore, I have copied below a Classic-ish column from earlier this year that is relevant to a new column that I am going to post tomorrow morning.  Please check back to find something to read over your Saturday morning coffee. -- Neil H. Buchanan     When the World Turns Upside Down, We Need to Be Willing to Change Our Minds (warning: misleading teaser) By Neil H. Buchanan - February 03, 2025 While not exactly click-bait, this column's headline is deliberately somewhat deceptive.  (Hence, the parenthetical disclaimer.)  After all...