Dorf on Law

Yesterday, Brown University became the third Ivy League institution to sign a settlement agreement with the Trump administration. Its deal is quite similar to the one Columbia entered . Like Columbia's, Brown's agreement asserts that it does not permit the government to "dictate" the university's "curriculum or the content of academic speech." But also like the Columbia deal, the Brown deal commits to the Trump administration's extremely tendentious view of Title IX's requirements as they apply to transgender persons. In one respect, the Brown agreement goes further along the anti-trans dimension. It includes this paragraph that has no parallel in the Columbia agreement: The University will not perform gender reassignment surgery or prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child's appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex. One might think that the purpose of gender-affirming...

I have written some of my own posts (e.g., here ,  here , and here ) and published others by my co-bloggers (e.g., here and here ) either delving into or obliquely referring to the sordid life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, but I have resisted commenting on the latest round of Epstein frenzy because I have thought it substantially less important than the major developments in the Trump administration's assault on the institutions of constitutional democracy (and its assault on life on Earth ). I still think that all things Epstein are a distraction, but today I feel like I need a distraction from the horrid other news.  Accordingly, today's essay focuses on the defamation lawsuit that Donald Trump has filed against The Wall Street Journal , News Corp. ( WSJ 's parent company), Robert Thomson (CEO of News. Corp.), Rupert Murdoch (Chairman Emeritus of News Corp.), and two WSJ reporters (Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo) who broke the story that Trump once gifted Epstei...

There is exactly one bit of advice that I give young people regarding how to choose a writing topic: If you read or hear something and find yourself spontaneously shouting " What?! " then you almost certainly have found a good subject for your next piece.  That is especially true for longer-form projects like law review articles and books, because it takes quite a lot of energy to stick with a project for months or even years and see it through to the end.  Bringing a boatload of passion to a new project is essential, because there will be times when your energy will flag.  But even with shorter pieces, one can hardly go wrong by writing a response to something that makes one's blood boil.  (I am hardly the first person to have offered this advice, of course, although I express it more colorfully than most of my like-minded colleagues do.) This morning, as I was sorting through possible ideas for this column, I came across this headline in The New York Times : "Trum...

Over the past several months, I’ve occasionally spoken to reporters about the Trump administration’s efforts to bully state and local governments into abandoning “sanctuary” policies and collaborating with ICE’s campaign of mass deportations. The administration has taken a multi-pronged approach to compel compliance, including filing lawsuits that allege that various non-cooperation or pro-immigration policies are preempted by federal law, withholding or clawing back federal funds, making public threats to arrest or investigate officials who refuse to cooperate, or “flooding” cities with hostile federal agents. Just last week, this strategy appeared to pay off. After receiving a threatening letter from the Justice Department, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky announced that the city would begin honoring federal requests to detain immigrants for 48 hours after their release date from custody to allow ICE to pick them up—apparently flouting the city’s 2017 ordinance prohibiting “detain...

Seventeen years ago yesterday, I published " Meat, Dairy, Psychology, Law, Economics " here on Dorf on Law .  Although that column was couched in somewhat boring academic terms, it was in reality a very personal piece explaining why I had decided to become a vegan.  Ever since then, I have published yearly "veganniversary" columns (see  2024 ,  2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 plus followup , 2019 plus followup , 2018 , 2017 , 2016 , 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , 2010 , 2009 , as well as the original column in 2008 plus followup ). And now it is 2025, the better part of two decades later.  What's up?  As I announced last month, I recently relocated to Ireland as a visiting professor at University College Dublin's Sutherland School of Law.  I cannot know how long I will end up staying here (for one year or fifty), but I am thinking of it as my new home, just as I treated Toronto as my home for the two years that I lived there before hopping ac...

Reporting (e.g.,  in the NY Times ) on the settlement agreement between Columbia University and the United States government describes the $200 million that Columbia will pay to obtain restoration of its grant funding as a "fine." When I read that report, I was initially puzzled. None of the federal agencies whose leaders signed the agreement--the Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services--is authorized by law to impose fines on institutions found to be in violation of Title VI. Yet the ostensible offense that led the Trump administration to cancel $400 million of federal funding and threaten to cut off billions more in the future was Columbia's alleged violation of Title VI by failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. Congress could have authorized fines as penalties for Title VI violations, but it didn't. So what entitles the executive branch to impose fines via settlement? Reading the settlement agreement itself  provide...

Approaching my 35 th year of teaching, and passing my 67 th year of life, and with retirement not too far away, I was struck by the recent comments of Scottie Scheffler, the number one ranked golfer in the world. In a rather solemn interview, he questioned the connections between career success and happiness or internal peace. Here are some of his comments about his career: It's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart… That's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis…. It's like showing up at the Masters every year; it's like why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly? I don't know because, if I win, it's going to be awesome for two minutes…. You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister's there, it's such an amazing moment. Then it's like, OK, what are we going to eat for dinner? It fee...

Almost every year, I contribute an essay to the tax law sub-site of Jotwell - The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) , which is edited at the University of Miami's law school.  I was not able to produce a piece last year, but I am confident that I more than made up for that this year with "I’m Not a Distortion, You’re a Distortion! " which was published last week (July 17, 2025).  There, I reviewed an article by Professor Rebecca Morrow of Wake Forest's law school,  The Income Tax as a Market Correction , which is forthcoming in UC San Francisco's flagship law journal. Jotwell's "jots" are relatively short, in this instance just a bit more than 1200 words, which means that I can ask readers here to click over and read that article with some hope that many of you will do so.  I will add only a few more thoughts here on Dorf on Law , again being uncharacteristically brief.  The most important issue can be found in the title of this column, regarding the...

Over the last several months, I have repeatedly encountered news stories reporting on the ostensible irony that some policy that the Trump administration is pursuing through executive action or in Congress will hurt the mostly white rural and working poor Americans who voted for him in large numbers. Here are some recent examples. *      Cuts to the National Weather Service and FEMA leave rural communities more vulnerable to natural disasters and may have already played a role with respect to preparedness and the response to the west Texas floods. *      Cuts to Medicaid will have their greatest impact on people who qualified for expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, who are disproportionately working class. Those same cuts will be devastating for rural hospitals, many of which will close, leaving people in deep-red counties without access to emergency health care and in many instances without access to any health care. *      Cuts...

What is a "win" or a "victory"?  Those words can only meaningfully describe having prevailed in a contest that could have gone the other way.  For example, even though 50.2 percent of counted votes were cast against Donald Trump in 2024, he did eke out a plurality of the popular vote, with his total being 1.48 percent higher than Kamala Harris's (and thus the sixth smallest plurality in US history).  But that outcome is correctly described as a win or a victory, because it was very much not in the bag in advance, and it even seemed likely that Trump would repeat his 2016 performance and become President again only via the Electoral College -- or perhaps through a successful coup this time around. As I noted in my column earlier this week, however, it is infuriatingly obtuse (bordering on insane) to describe what has been happening in the last six months in the way that  The New York Times  recently did: as Trump "tall[ying] wins."  No, he is in fact g...