Dorf on Law

2025 is almost in the books and it cannot end quickly enough. Our country has descended into a nation that looks more like Biff’s domain from Back to the Future II than the nation I used to know and love. Personally, a few weeks ago a scary 95% blocked artery to the heart (now fixed) made me reflect on my own life in beneficial ways. I am incredibly grateful for my family and my friends. In the end, they matter the most, of course. I am 67 and have been teaching and writing about constitutional law for over half my life. I have said much of what I want to about the Court (that isn’t one) and the menace who currently sits in the White House.  But I hope to continue stirring up trouble for at least a few more years. I’ll start right now as this crushing year comes to an end. Our country is facing far more severe crises than our awful Supreme Court. But most of those problems are beyond my professional expertise. The current terrible state of constitutional law is, however, my wh...

We here at DoL are enjoying the holidays, so I'm posting the following classic column from a little over a year ago. It originally ran under the headline "Losing the War on Christmas But Winning the Battle for the Culture? A pre-Thanksgiving Reflection." As you'll see, the theme is that despite its political power, the right is not winning the culture war. I think it mostly holds up well. For example, Donald Trump's characteristically heavy-handed and self-aggrandizing efforts to seize control of national culture by rebranding the Kennedy Center in his own image have mostly led to a flight of talent. However, there is one way in which I must concede the right is winning: its scapegoating of and attacks on transgender Americans has seeped into liberal/left rhetoric and policies . Now here's the rerun: -------------------------------- Losing the War on Christmas But Winning the Battle for the Culture? A pre-Thanksgiving Reflection Although Thanksgiving is still...

My latest Verdict column assesses President Trump's proposal to use tariff revenue to fund $2,000 payments to Americans earning under $100,000. I chose to write about this topic now because last week Trump claimed, falsely, that payments of $1,776 to U.S. military service members were being funded by tariffs, when in fact the money comes from a supplemental housing fund appropriated by Congress as part of the "Big Beautiful Bill" it enacted over the summer. That fund is taken from general revenues, not from tariffs in particular. After parsing the legality of Trump's other plan to spend tariff revenue on rebates to the American public, I offer various reasons why it's a bad idea. Among those reasons is the reasonable likelihood that the Supreme Court will invalidate the tariffs as not authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. If so, and if rebate checks (or their refundable tax credit equivalent) have already gone out, that would create a fis...

With two weeks of holiday disruptions (and, one hopes, loads of joy and love) ahead of us, I expect this to be my last new  Dorf on Law  column of 2025.  I have decided to use this space to return to a topic that I discussed in two columns last month: " It Matters That the Extremely Close 2024 US Election Results Were Not Due to 'the Economy'" (November 4), and " 'Affordability Issues': Did Democrats Land on a Good Strategy for a Bad Reason? " (November 7). Why go back to what is in some ways the oldest of old news, with possibly nothing good to come from brooding over the whole mess yet again?  After all, no matter how it happened, Donald Trump ended up back in the Oval Office, and we are where we are today.  And "where we are" includes, for me, having only minutes ago received a "Here's to healthy holidays" email from Medicare, signed by ... Dr. Oz!!  Notably, he did not say Merry Christmas, so I guess the War on Christmas ...

This evening (from 6 to 8 pm Eastern time), I'll be giving a talk about birthright citizenship at the Tompkins County Public Library.  It also airs live on the library's YouTube channel and thereafter lives as a recording on the same page. Tonight's talk is part of the library's "Rights to Know" series. I gave another talk  in the series--on the Bill of Rights--earlier this fall. These talks are intended for a general audience, so regular readers of this blog might find them too basic for them. Nonetheless, as with all of my efforts to speak to non-lawyers, I try to provide sufficient background to make the subject matter comprehensible without dumbing down--to simplify without over-simplifying. Often when I write a blog post in anticipation of giving a lecture or speaking on a panel, I offer a summary of my remarks to help me formulate and organize them. I don't need to do so here because sent the library my PowerPoint slides, but I'll do so below b...

An undergraduate student at a US university contacted me recently with some interesting questions about the possibilities and benefits of tuition-free higher education in the United States.  In this unusually brief column, I will reproduce his questions and my answers, after which I will make a couple of short points that were inspired by my answer to one of the questions.   Question 1: Do you think that free college in America is possible? Me : Sadly, I don't. We're of course a wealthy enough country to do it, and we've done it in the not-too-distant past (1960's, 70's, and into the 80's), but the US's political situation makes it impossible. The Republicans were apoplectic about former President Biden's student loan partial forgiveness plan, which was quite minimalist.  I can't see how a national program of free higher ed stands a chance politically for the foreseeable future.   Question 2: College is free in other places like Germany, Norway and...

Per my usual custom around this time of year, I am posting the final exam I administered to my first-year students in constitutional law this past semester. Students had four hours to complete the exam, which was open-book but without access to the Internet or AI. Readers should feel free to take as much time as they wish and use whatever tools they find helpful! Question 1 (35%)             The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in  Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump  and  Trump v. V.O.S. , which present the question whether various tariffs President Trump has imposed are authorized by the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). The plaintiffs challenging the tariffs argue, among other things, that IEEPA provides the president with no tariff authority at all. Assume for purposes of this question that the Supreme Court agrees with that argument and rules 7-2 for the plaintiffs. Here is an exce...

In the tech world, the term vaporware is used to describe a product that does not yet and may never exist but that a company hypes for any number of reasons. For example, eventually, we will probably have a fully functional fleet of driverless cars, but Elon Musk has been promising that his Teslas will be fully self-driving in just another few years for a decade . Unless and until Tesla produces and sells such vehicles, its self-driving cars are vaporware. Meanwhile, three events in last week's news highlight how much of what Donald Trump does as president is the equivalent of vaporware. 1) Pardon? The most amusing incident was Trump's announcement that he was pardoning Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison for tampering with election machines in service of Trump's Big Lie during the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. It is not clear whether Trump merely announced an intention to pardon Peters or has actually...