Dorf on Law

I do not know the best way to address the effects of centuries of legally sanctioned racist governmental policies. From slavery to Black Codes to segregation to red lining, our country imposed the opposite of color-blind policies on Black Americans for most of our history. These policies treated them first as property, then as indentured workers, then as people white folks did not want in their schools or their neighborhoods. Racist and oppressive government programs led directly to where we are today--a country where people are still judged by the color of their skin not the content of their character.  Black people represent about 13.5 percent of the population. Here are some alarming but not surprising data: 43% of Black people own their homes as compared to 72% of white people. In 1900, yes 1900, the gap was smaller. In that year, 48% of White people owned houses compared to 21% of Black people. The gap is larger now than when segregation was rampant and legal. The median inc...

Imagine a person who confidently and condescendingly tells you that he knows the answer to every question, except that he constantly gets facts wrong and cannot reason his way out of a paper bag.  Oh, and he is almost as unlikable as Ted Cruz.  Is he J.D. Vance, or is he AI?  (Admittedly, AI is not a "person," but are we truly sure about J.D.?) Early last month, I had some fun writing a couple of columns about large-language models -- which have, quite inaccurately, come to be called Artificial Intelligence (AI) -- and how bad they are.  On June 3 and June 9 , with reference to my lone previous column mentioning AI from last Fall, I stipulated that my critique was not based on tech expertise but simply on the fact that AI has been shown again and again -- no matter how much it has supposedly improved over time -- to be all but useless. I captured the fundamental problem in a quote from a podcaster that I used in both recent columns:  " If you presented a ca...

Last week, Justices Barrett and Kagan appeared before a House appropriations subcommittee to explain the Supreme Court's request for a budget increase. As has been widely reported (e.g., here ), the bulk of the requested increase is to address heightened security needs, as threats to Justices have increased in recent years. Both Justices Barrett and Kagan pointed to the Dobbs leak in 2022 as the point from which to measure the increase. Certainly there were security threats that one could specifically tie to that leak, most prominently the man who was arrested  in June 2022 near Justice Kavanaugh's home with a gun, a knife, pepper spray, and burglars' tools. Overall, however, I suspect that the threats being directed at the Justices are simply part of the larger trend of increased political violence more broadly. In general, that threat is greater from the right than from the left , although I don't know whether that's true with respect to threats directed specific...

The US Supreme Court's just-completed term will go down as another bloodbath for American constitutionalism, for the rule of law, and even for basic decency.  In yesterday's Part One of this two-part column, I explained that my goal is not to provide a "summary of the term" analysis along the lines that Professor Dorf has already done so well.  Instead, I have collected a few stray threads within various cases that might provide useful ways to think about what is happening and is likely to happen in the near future. Yesterday's entry promised a long list of such stray threads, but in fact my first two examples were more than enough to fill a column (and then some).  Those two examples included a good outcome ( Chatrie v. U.S. , a Fourth Amendment case the Professor Matthew Tokson nicely analyzed in three posts on this blog) and one with a very bad outcome ( Mullin v. Al Otro Lado , in which the Roberts Six played with words to negate a duly enacted statute). To ...

How bad was the latest US Supreme Court term?  Plenty bad, especially for anyone who cares at all about democracy or the rule of law.  There were a few relatively pleasant surprises, but even those cases (as I will demonstrate shortly) can have worrisome lead linings hiding inside.  But the truly awful decisions dominated the Court's output once again in 2025-26. For readers looking for a relatively traditional "summary of the term"-style analysis, one could hardly do better than to click on Professor Dorf's recent " Is the Roberts Court Hyperopic or Willfully Blind? " (first posted on SCOTUSblog ).  Because constitutional law has never been my day job or even my hobby, I am not pretending to be able -- or even inclined to try -- to offer that kind of overall assessment of the Court's work.  Instead, my approach here and in tomorrow's Part Two of this column will be eclectic, discussing a few notable points within cases that strike me as having been ...

I've been blogging here  ( and here ) recently about Chatrie v. United States , the Supreme Court's landmark Fourth Amendment case decided late last month.  Chatrie held that geofence searches, which use cellphone data to track cellphone users in a certain area at a certain time, are Fourth Amendment searches requiring probable cause and a warrant. In today’s post, I'll talk about which theories of Fourth Amendment law the Court adopted in Chatrie  and which it didn't. First, I’ll explore why Justice Gorsuch hasn’t gained any support over the past eight years for his property-centered approach to Fourth Amendment searches. Second, I’ll look at the bigger picture of the Court’s embrace of privacy and rejection of traditional measures in applying the Fourth Amendment to the modern world.  What Happened to the New Property Era in Fourth Amendment Law? Justice Gorsuch wrote separately in Chatrie , concurring in the result. He argued that the Court should discard th...