Dorf on Law

From the very beginning of the Roberts Court in 2005, the Chief along with all the conservative justices except Anthony Kennedy (and for the last few months of her tenure, Sandra Day O'Connor), have been obsessed with imposing a uniform rule of color blindness on local, state, and national legislatures as well as public and private elementary and secondary schools, colleges, and universities.  Roberts made his values known at the end of the first full term of his court when   he wrote the following [in]famous sound bite in a landmark case prohibiting two cities from voluntarily addressing racially imbalanced schools: “the way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.” There are now six justices who hold this view. There can be no debate that this country allowed formalized racial discrimination against non-whites for most of our history. From slavery to Black Codes to segregation to red-lining, the law allowed discrimination against racia...

I will offer below some updates on the ever-changing US situation regarding the effects of gerrymandering on the 2026 midterms.  Spoiler alert: It is still looking good for Democrats overall -- though definitely bad for Black Democratic officeholders, due to the recent dirty deeds of the Supreme Court.  Before I get there, however, it is worth looking back on some very recent history. In late 2022, after the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in that year's midterm elections, I planned to write a series of columns under the blanket title "Gerrymandering is the Only Thing that Anyone Should be Talking About."  I never wrote those columns, because I had at that point begun a process that would  completely disrupt my life  for several years, but my intended point was a valid one. Recall that in the first two years of the Biden presidency, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.  True, the toxic dyad of Joe Manchin and Kyrste...

N.B.  As readers may recall, I currently serve on the steering committee of the Reconstructing Free Expression initiative of the Knight Institute. As part of our work, we are holding a number of day-long meetings with people from diverse relevant backgrounds to brainstorm both diagnosis and treatment. For these meetings, participants, including steering committee members, produce short think-pieces to jump-start our conversation. My salvo for the first convening appeared on the Knight Institute website and was cross-posted on this blog in February. Below you will find my essay for the second day-long meeting, which occurred two weeks ago. It can also be found on the Knight Institute website (with the title below). ------- Support Local Journalism, Expand the Definition of Fraud, and Guard Against Boomerang Effects Two broad categories of problems plague the information ecosystem of the United States: (1) long-term problems occasioned by technological changes over the last three...

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a brief order extending its stay of the Fifth Circuit decision that invalidated FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone for prescription via telemedicine and delivery via the mail (or other courier). Some reporting indicated that the vote was 7-2. It probably was. We know that two Justices published dissents, but it’s the Court’s custom not to provide the vote on per curiam orders. Dissenters can, if they choose, say they are dissenting, but they don't always do so. So we know that Justices Thomas and Alito dissented because they wrote to tell us so, but we don’t know whether zero, one, or two other Justices also dissented. We do know the reasons that Justices Thomas and Alito gave--and they are doozies. Let's start with Justice Thomas. He writes that the makers of mifepristone are not entitled to seek relief from the Court because they are engaged in a "criminal enterprise." He claims that the notorious Comstock Act, enacte...

When I come across a particularly inane news article, I save the link and jot down a few words to remind myself what I was thinking when I flagged it.  For this column, the offending piece is from  The New York Times  (of course) on April 25, 2026: "New Taxes Helped Cool London’s Housing Market. Could That Happen in New York?"  And here is my "note to self": "Unbelievable BS re NYC taxes."  In my  Dorf on Law   column last weekend, I wrote that the editors at The Times  "often ... push anti-progressive-tax narratives, as I will discuss in a column in the next week or so."  This is that column. Before picking apart that particular example of bad economic journalism, it is important to remember that the wealthiest people in the world have used sheer repetition to convince far too many of us that taxes are the root of all evil.  You know that taxes always destroy everything, right?  Every time we tax anything, anything at a...

My new Verdict column addresses the question of what can and should be done to mitigate the damage from the Supreme Court's further destruction of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in Louisiana v. Callais . The column is aspirational in that it proposes federal legislation that could not be enacted unless and until Democrats hold a majority in both houses of Congress and there is a Democratic president. Even then, enacting such legislation would almost surely require ending the filibuster. In today's essay, I consider where such legislation should fit in a legislative agenda for 2029 or, in the event that Democrats don't control Congress and the presidency in 2029 but a constitutional republic still survives into the further future, 2033, 2037, or whenever. The column discusses two bills that passed the House but died in the Senate during the Biden administration. One, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act  (JRLVRAA), would amend the VRA. Because it strengthens mechani...

Should professors reflect on their successes and failures, taking the proverbial hard look into a mirror to ask how we could do better?  Of course we should.  In fact, everyone should do that, no matter what kind of work they do -- or even if they do not engage in paid work at all.  Being a decent human being involves self-doubt, commitment to doing better, and a fundamental humility that should always guide us, even when we are being brash or assertive.  Too many people do not do that, however, and the world is seeing the kind of havoc a presidential administration staffed entirely by such people is capable of wreaking. I focused on professors in my opening sentence, however, because my field is rife with people who are committed to telling the rest of us that we are being insufficiently introspective.  In a column last week, " Reasoning With Zealots While Under Attack by Those Same Zealots ," I responded to a particularly clever bit of misdirection o...