Dorf on Law

What is the deal with the "app" that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are so upset about, the one that supposedly allows those dastardly foreigners to enter the country illegally at Kamala Harris's invitation?  That is all a lie, of course, but it goes beyond the kind of constant lies that Republicans now rotely repeat everywhere they go.  This is not, after all, like Trump's obviously false assertion that every legal scholar -- no matter their ideological priors -- wanted Roe to be overturned.  It is not even the kind of sleazy lie that Vance tells so easily, such as his claim that Trump "salvaged Obamacare" or the whopper that Trump left office peacefully on January 20, 2021. That latter lie, by the way, is exactly the kind of word play that is a con man like Vance's stock in trade.  People of that ilk love it when they can say that they are technically correct, which means that they consciously choose not to understand why legal systems define perjury

This year's Vice Presidential non-debate happened two days ago.  Thankfully, I am spending October as a visiting scholar in Dublin, so it was 2am Wednesday here when Tim Walz and J.D. Vance entered the CBS studio on Tuesday evening.  Professor Dorf thus drew the short straw for writing Dorf on Law 's immediate reaction, and his analysis was much more informative and interesting than the event itself.  I recommend it to anyone who has not yet had a chance to read it. In any case, I will not bury my lead/lede: Vance exposed himself as even more of a shameless liar, and he did nothing to change or explain his chilling lack of care for the human beings who have suffered because of his bottomless pit of ambition.  (See my commentaries from last week here , here , here , and especially here .)  Yet somehow, the story from the non-debate is that he was "smooth" and maybe even "normal."  So I guess all it takes to neutralize a very recent history of embracing neo-N

In January 2022, I learned that Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes was a Yale Law School graduate. That morsel kindled my curiosity: which alum most embarrasses YLS? I conducted an unscientific poll via Twitter in which I gave respondents four choices: Rhodes; Bill Clinton; Samuel Alito; and Alan Dershowitz. (Four was the maximum number of possible choices, so I had to omit other worthy potential contestants, like Clarence Thomas.) To my surprise, Dershowitz won not just a plurality but an outright majority. I wrote up my results in a kidding/not-kidding blog post . Shortly thereafter, Dershowitz wrote an unintentionally hilarious response on the website of a Middle-East focused right-wing organization in which he: (a) asserted without a hint of irony that as a zealous advocate for his clients he was following in the footsteps of John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, and Thurgood Marshall; (b) attempted to discredit me by pointing out that Laurence Tribe--who was my mentor an

In a recent essay on this blog, Professor Eric Segall argued that the conservatives who have long mocked Justice Douglas's opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut   for its invocation of penumbras and emanations from the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights have done the equivalent--and then some--for their pet projects, including Presidential immunity. I agree wholeheartedly with the critique, which, not to put too fine a point on it, accuses the Roberts Court of rank hypocrisy. I write today to linger over the alternatives to penumbras and emanations in Griswold itself. Within a short time after Griswold was decided, its rationale shifted from Justice Douglas's penumbras and emanations to the more frank embrace of substantive due process of Justice Harlan, which he described in a concurrence in the judgment in Griswold and had foreshadowed in his dissent from the jurisdictional holding in  Poe v. Ullman . When I teach Griswold , students are sometimes puzzled why Douglas didn&