Dorf on Law

On March 2, the Court will hear oral argument in United States v. Hemani , which raises the question whether a federal statute prohibiting the possession of firearms by any person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance,” violates the Second Amendment as applied to the defendant in the case. This federal law was one of the charges that formed the  basis  for Hunter Biden's conviction in 2024. The defendant in Hermani  is an admitted drug dealer who uses marijuana about every other day. The FBI obtained a warrant to search his home where the agents found a Glock 9mm pistol, 60 grams of marijuana, and 4.7 grams of cocaine. The prosecution's case rested solely on the defendant's habitual use of marijuana.  The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, otherwise known as the Court of Unlimited Gun Rights, summarily affirmed a lower court decision (relying on a previous Fifth Circuit case ) that held that this law can only be constitutionally applied to ...

The big news out of the Justice Department on Wednesday was made by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who, testifying in the House of Representatives, proved that she is extremely well qualified to hold the office she does . . . given who the president is. But while Bondi was hissing that Representative Jamie Raskin --who is not only an outstanding lawyer but a former constitutional law professor--is "not even a lawyer," her top deputy, Todd Blanche, was taking on the third branch of the U.S. government. Federal judges in the Northern District of New York had just named Donald Kinsella as US Attorney to fill a vacancy created when the term of the previous acting US Attorney, John Sarcone, expired. Blanche promptly sent Kinsella an email and, with the dignity we have come to expect from this administration, tweeted "Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella." Can that be right? Not exactly but maybe k...

I have decided to do something unusual with today's column.  My standard practice when I see something that I want to share with readers is to provide a link along with a description of why the linked document is worth reading, sometimes quoting from the document in question, and in rare cases drawing multiple block quotes from one particularly important document. Today, I am reproducing an entire document.  US Rep. Jamie Raskin's opening statement in the House Judiciary Committee's hearing yesterday with Pam Bondi (who is, incredibly, the Attorney General of this country's federal government) is so important that I am essentially "ceding my time" to him here.  I could offer the usual "interested readers should click here" in the course of offering my additional thoughts on the matter, but this is so important that I simply want to copy the whole of it and share it with everyone.  As it happens, it is approximately the same length as the typical  Dor...

Recall at issue in Trump v. Barbara is President Trump’s Executive Order that purports to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to non-citizen parents who are not permanent residents. The federal district court in New Hampshire preliminarily enjoined the EO, determining that it violates both the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a) —which essentially parrots the language of the Citizenship Clause. The Supreme Court granted the government’s petition for certiorari, the briefing is coming in, and oral argument is set for April 1, 2026. The Citizenship Clause reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The government asserts that the Fourteenth Amendment’s language “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes children born to parents who are not permanent residents, because they are not “subject to the juris...

In this column, I draw an analogy between how we came to understand COVID and how we should try to understand how Trumpism works.  To do so, I need to take us back to the bad old days of the early 2020's. In the years since COVID-19 turned the world on its head, I have heard people wonder aloud why we did some of the things that we did at the time, asking rhetorical questions along the lines of this popular example of the genre: "Remember when we were all microwaving the mail when it arrived?  How ridiculous was that?"  Although some permanently angry people bring that up now to claim that the entire response to the pandemic was too "woke," reasonable people are more or less bemused to think back on the ways in which we were all flailing our way through a suddenly changed world.  The vibe is more or less a "Can you believe how ugly our hairstyles were in the 1980's?" kind of thing. Although that latter group undeniably has the better of the two ex ...

I am pre-writing today's blog post on the afternoon of Friday February 6 because I have a busy weekend planned. By the time this essay goes live, for all I know the U.S. will be at war with Iran, a deal will have been worked out with Iran whereby sanctions are lifted in exchange for a Trump-branded Tehran casino, or, because nothing makes any sense anymore, both. Meanwhile, my subject isn't even the thing that would cause the most outrage if done by any other president in history to hit the news today . That dishonor belongs to Trump's social media post of a racist video depiction of the Obamas and his almost contrition. As The NY Times reported : "The decision to delete the link from his social media site was an unusual walk-back by Mr. Trump, whose own press secretary just hours earlier had brushed off criticism of the video as 'fake outrage' and made no attempt to distance the president from it." I'll focus today on this revelation : The Trump admin...

In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the most anti-originalist and irrational decision interpreting the Second Amendment in American history. In  New York State Pistol & Rifle Association v. Bruen ,  Justice Thomas, writing for the conservative Justices, struck down a 1911 New York law that gave government officials discretion to approve or deny permits for the open carry of firearms. The Court held that judges can no longer uphold gun reform laws unless the government affirmatively points to similar laws from 1791 or 1868. The Court said that judges are not allowed to balance gun rights against the public policy concerns (no matter how important) that states use to justify gun restrictions. This "text and tradition" only test will be used  by the justices this term to decide two major Second Amendment cases. One  case  that was argued late last month (Mike wrote a helpful summary here ), involves an Hawaii law banning the carrying o...

It has not been at all difficult to predict what Donald Trump would be willing to do when it comes to dismantling constitutional democracy in the United States.  Anyone listening to him for the past ten-plus years could easily see that he was willing to do anything -- obviously including breaking the law -- to obtain and hold onto power. The only reason so few of us have a nearly perfect record when it comes to Trumpian predictions is that we have not been deterred by the idea that "he couldn't possibly try to do that."  Yes he could, and he has.  All of which means that the difference between people who have predicted his actions correctly and incorrectly is the difference between people who are realistic and those who are too scared to say what they see with their own eyes. The one true outlier was Trump's temporary departure from the scene on January 20, 2021.  Those of us who correctly predicted that he would never leave peacefully were proved right on ...