Dorf on Law

On Tuesday of this week, in " The Other Huge Election Issue: Taxing the Billionaires ," I wrote this about next month's US midterm elections: [B]eyond control of Congress, there are other fundamentally important matters to be determined at the ballot box, including state-level offices and referenda. From my perspective, by far the most important of those matters is whether the billionaire class will succeed in buying themselves out of being taxed, which they are trying to do by flooding the airwaves in certain states with anti-tax propaganda. California is one of the states in which voters will determine the fate of a wealth tax, so I then provided a link to my annual  Jotwell  column  ( The Billionaire Tax: Dispassionate Analysis of a Policy that We Desperately Need ), in which I summarized and endorsed four tax scholars' assessment of the anti-tax arguments that California's billionaires have been pushing relentlessly. While I would normally write a new  Dorf o...

The recent spasm of nihilistic violence in France will almost certainly have terrible consequences, including, not least, the election of Marine Le Pen next year. The 1968 U.S. presidential election was close. With George Wallace carrying the Deep South, Richard Nixon and Humbert Humphrey were very close in the popular vote. Public opinion turning against the Vietnam War no doubt helped Nixon, with Humphrey closely associated with President Lyndon Johnson, but Nixon also capitalized on public reaction against the long hot summers of the previous several years. Mayhem in the streets predictably tends to lead to a popular desire for a firm hand. Most of the French citizens who will cast ballots for Le Pen no doubt like her anti-immigrant views, but there is an ironic, albeit predictable, effect of the violence. To oversimplify greatly, we can identify three broad categories of people who took to the streets in France: (1) students, farmers, workers, and others peacefully protesting the p...

Understandably, almost everyone's focus during the US midterm election campaign this year has been on the possible swing of one or both houses of Congress to majority Democratic control.  That is without doubt the most important question that will be determined two weeks from today. (As an aside, however, please understand that we will not know for days, weeks, or perhaps months after November 3 how that question will have been answered on Election Day.  Brace yourselves.) But beyond control of Congress, there are other fundamentally important matters to be determined at the ballot box, including state-level offices and referenda.  From my perspective, by far the most important of those matters is whether the billionaire class will succeed in buying themselves out of being taxed, which they are trying to do by flooding the airwaves in certain states with anti-tax propaganda. With that in mind, and in lieu of new content here today, I offer this link to my annual contribu...

Are you struggling to make sense of President Trump's series of moves to lift sanctions on and import diesel fuel from Russia? The reported reason for the diesel move is that Americans, including key Republican constituencies, are very unhappy with the price of diesel fuel, but every analysis I've seen indicates that adding Russian diesel to the supply will have at most a small marginal impact on price. And indeed, the price of diesel in the U.S. dropped by only about $0.02 per gallon on Trump's announcement, which is hardly surprising given that diesel fuel is sold on a global market. Russia will divert to the U.S. market some diesel fuel it otherwise would have sold to China and other countries that were not applying sanctions, but that doesn't eliminate the demand from those countries, so the net effect on global prices and thus U.S. prices is very small. In light of the very limited impact on diesel prices, one might wonder what Trump is doing. Why give Putin sancti...

Justice Alito titled his new "book," " So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court, and our Country. " This project is not new, and it is not quite a "book." It is a compendium of previously given speeches reproduced in no particular order. Moreover, Justice Alito can, of course, call himself anything he wants, but his judging is not originalist in any meaningful sense of that term. This contradiction comes through most clearly through Alito's repeated obsession with the free exercise clause, which he treats as a super strong constitutional amendment while almost completely ignoring the establishment clause in the many speeches devoted to what Alito calls religious liberty. In terms of the "Court" and the "Country" referenced in the title, these speeches do provide insight into why Alito judges the way he does but not in the way he might have hoped, and that disconnect gets in the way of any serious self-ref...

Trigger warning: After warming up with some relatively pedestrian backstory, this column becomes a full-on festival of sarcasm.  Richly deserved sarcasm, to be sure, but even by my standards, today is a lot.  Proceed at your own risk. The Prizes from Norway and Sweden have now been handed out for 2026, and as everyone knows, the big news was that Donald Trump again did not win the Nobel Peace Prize that Barack Obama once won.  That this outcome could surprise no one with a working brain did not, of course, stop Trump from melting down.  Almost immediately after not winning, he and his Administration decided to " get medieval " on the International Criminal Court, which is one of the former professional homes of the person who did win the prize , "Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law," according to the prize committee's press release. Again, that is the big news on the Nobel front, as it should be.  I, however, ...

My latest Verdict column previews the current Supreme Court Term. Yes, I'm aware that the Term is underway, so this is a preview of the cases yet to be argued. You can think of it as also a preview of how the Court will likely rule in cases already argued. I discussed one of the oral arguments from last week on the blog . Professor Vik Amar and I discussed that case and others in a webinar last week as well. (The recording is here .) As I explain in the new Verdict  column, this is shaping up to be a pretty sleepy SCOTUS Term. Even the cases that sound juicy are either about technical issues or are interstitial--steps on a path the Court has already laid down. In the column, I acknowledge the possibility that the Court will decide some important cases on its emergency docket concerning immigration or the midterm election, but I tentatively predict that it won't make much new law. Zooming out to see the big picture, the Roberts Court has already checked off the major items on t...

What happens when you tell a group of international legal experts that the US is now post-legal?  Today, I found out.  They are, to understate the point, worried.  But before getting there, I should lay the groundwork for this story. My good fortune often brings me back to Vienna (the former imperial capital, not the exurb of Washington, DC), where I am now a Senior Research Fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business's Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law.  Yesterday and today, the Institute hosted a conference titled " 2026 WU Transfer Pricing Symposium: Transfer Pricing Case Law around the World ." Please stay awake!  I confess that this topic is sleep-inducing even for those of us who work in the salt mines of tax law, which means that I had low expectations when I agreed to chair one of the sessions: "Transfer Pricing and Intangibles."  Are you still there?  (Fingers snapping.) Seriously, though, I would normally not con...

Today is what we here in Ithaca recognize as Indigenous People's Day . In many parts of the United States, however, today is Columbus Day. Ithaca and various other progressive locales were inspired to change the designation in light of the fact--long known to historians and anyone who took the time to read accounts such as  Columbus's own letters  and reliable secondary literature --that Columbus enthusiastically captured, enslaved, and sent to Europe numerous native people, as well as expropriating their land, gold, and other resources. The most lethal impact of Columbus's voyage and the ensuing establishment of European colonies in the new world came from diseases to which the indigenous population had no immunity, and while the introduction of new microbes was not intentional on the part of Columbus or the conquistadors who followed him, they were not exactly unhappy about the fact that the depopulated lands left many fewer people who would resist colonization and create...