Dorf on Law

Yesterday on this blog, I reproduced my supplemental statement  to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for its campus antisemitism investigation. I simultaneously published a Verdict column describing and praising the Commission's final report on that subject. In today's essay, I want to explore some oddities of federal civil rights law raised by the topic. In my column, I state that discrimination (or inadequate measures to respond to discrimination) against Jews by a federally funded entity violates Title VI, where the discrimination is based on "Jewishness as a matter of ancestry." Readers unfamiliar with the details of federal civil rights law may wonder why I didn't simply say that such discrimination would violate Title VI as religious discrimination. The short answer is that Title VI forbids discrimination "on the ground of race, color, or national origin" but not on the basis of religion. Anti-Jewish discrimination is sometimes covered only bec...

My latest Verdict column  (favorably) discusses the final report of the US Commission on Civil Rights on the topic of the federal response to campus antisemitism. In the column, I provide a link to my original written testimony and to the video of my oral testimony before the Commission back in February. For completeness, I'm devoting today's entry on the blog to publishing the supplemental letter I sent the Commission in March. It is also available in the folder labeled "Panel 1" here but you have to jump through some hoops to find it. Because I republished my initial written testimony on the blog, I thought it sensible to include the supplemental here.   Supplemental Submission of Michael C. Dorf * Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, Cornell Law School   United States Civil Rights Commission   RE: Antisemitism on America’s College and University Campuses: Current Conditions and the Federal Response   March 24, 2026   Distinguished commissioners:   ...

Count Binface became an international phenomenon this past summer.  For those who are unaware, the Count is a "novelty candidate" who has used the UK's easy ballot access to run for a series of offices as an ongoing publicity stunt.  Interestingly, the man behind Count Binface is a British comedian who happens also to have a classics degree from Oxford, which means that his political persona is both hilarious and unexpectedly well informed. In the "About Me" section of the Count's website , he helpfully explains that I’m an intergalactic space warrior and leader of the Recyclons from planet Sigma IX. I came to Earth in 2017 and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May (as ‘Lord Buckethead’), going went viral (in a non-Covid way). Then in 2018, after an unfortunate battle on the planet Copyright, I rewspawned [sic] in my true form as Count Binface to take on Boris Johnson in the 2019 election, where I scored a surprising 69. In 2021, I received 92,896 votes ...

Critiques of judicial supremacy and proposals limiting the Supreme Court's power are common on the left side of the legal academy these days. For most of the last sixty years, similar calls to control the Court came from conservatives upset about the liberal decisions of the Warren and early Burger Courts. Even during the Rehnquist Court era, from 1986-2006, most scholars on the American left were willing to roll the dice on the Supreme Court largely due to scholars like Laurence Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Akhil Amar, among many others, who came of age in the shadow of the Warren Court. But with the Roberts Court erasing many of the most important liberal decisions of the last 60 years and instituting a Republican Party list of priorities on the country, serious institutional critiques of the Court now come almost exclusively from liberals and progressives.  Given the political nature of constitutional law, this academic role reversal should not surprise anyone. We like to think...

Last week, Professor Dorf reminded us of "the risk of getting distracted by the relatively inconsequential nonsense emanating from Trump and his administration."  The day before, I wrote a column in which I focused on one of the most important issues of our time -- the Trump regime's dystopian deportation system -- writing that "at the very least, it is clear that the US is acting in ways that we once would have described as only imaginable under an authoritarian regime like China's."  Agreeing with the point that Professor Dorf would make the next day, I added: People like me follow the minutiae of US news cycles, and we chase shiny objects like Trump's failing health, his obviously false promise to pay people $5000 each if Republicans win the midterms, his obsession with erecting monuments to himself, and so on.  But while all of those stories are important in their own ways, the touchstone when assessing the current government should be that the US ...