Dorf on Law

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...

An issue that has unexpectedly dominated the news in recent weeks is the justified public outrage at Cornell University's wholly unacceptable response to allegations of rape at a 2024 fraternity party, a response that is at long last being exposed and condemned.  This entire matter is deeply troubling, and it is a somewhat hopeful sign that the university and local law enforcement -- and now New York State's political leaders -- are being pressured to take it seriously, especially given their earlier attempts to sweep it under the rug (or at least to fail to comprehend its importance, although I find that explanation highly implausible). (Aside: Donald Trump and his insecure manosphere are anything but outraged, except insofar as he thinks that the men involved "won't get a fair shake," saying "I feel badly" for them. No surprise there.) Professor Dorf's column this past Saturday considered some of the most important legal issues regarding consent...

"Where do I even begin?"  I feel confident that almost everyone reading this column will have uttered that rhetorical question at least once, because we have all been faced with people who spew out a long series of crazy or objectionable statements that pile up so quickly as to leave the listener with the sense of helplessness captured in that plaintive response: Where do I even begin? Before I get to Donald Trump (because that is obviously where this is going), it is useful to think about what it means to leave one's opponent with too much to say in too little time.  For those of us who participated in certain forms of competitive debating in school, "spreading" is the term for saying so much (usually by speed-talking in a timed speech) that one's opponent cannot possibly respond to everything.  Because all debaters learn that "silence means consent," the strategy by the spreader is to then spend their entire rebuttal speech listing the many argum...

In 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky published  Worlds in Collision , in which he argued that astronomical events such as the supposed expulsion of Venus as a comet from Jupiter occurred within the span of ancient human civilizations, that the resulting planetary interactions led to catastrophes on Earth, and that accounts of an ancient flood in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh and other events that are described in similar terms in different cultures were records of the consequences of the celestial collisions. Velikovsky had no training in science, history, or any other relevant discipline. He was a psychiatrist. Nonetheless, his book made a splash. Scientists knew that Velikovsky's astronomy was bunk but were impressed by his historical account of ancient religious texts and myths. Bible scholars, historians, and archeologists familiar with the relevant materials knew that Velikovsky's reconstruction of ancient events was bunk but were impressed by his science. Very few people we...