Dorf on Law

Since the Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen in 2022, I have written numerous blog posts and essays criticizing the opinion’s “insanity.” In Bruen , the Supreme Court invalidated a 1911 New York gun law on history and tradition grounds. More important than the specific result in the case, however, was the Court’s announcement of a brand new test to establish the validity of modern gun laws.  In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court decided that contemporary gun legislation can only be upheld by judges if the government points to similar laws passed either in 1791 or 1868. The Court rejected the traditional and historically justified balancing approach the Court uses to decide most constitutional law cases, whereby the justices weigh the importance of the asserted right against the government’s justifications for the law. I have described this new framework as follows: The Court’s decision in Bruen is not steep...

I drafted this column's headline more than six months ago, but I never actually wrote the column to go with it.  Although the content of today's column covers more than the specific problem noted, I still like the headline enough to stick with it.  A more boring, accurate headline might be: "Republicans Continue to Prove That They Never Cared About Intellectual Diversity," or something like that. In any event, the news story that inspired today's headline was " Texas Professor Fired After Accusations of Teaching 'Gender Ideology,' " with the subheadline "Two administrators also lost their posts at Texas A&M, an example of how Republican policies meant to curb liberal ideas are reaching into university classrooms," which  The New York Times  published on September 10, 2025.  That article reported that Texas A&M University swiftly fired a lecturer and removed two administrators after a student filmed herself arguing with the ...

California Governor Gavin Newsom has dyslexia.  Most people might imagine that that would count as a very small news item, if indeed it counts as news at all.  Donald Trump, however, always leaps on any opportunity to demean people, especially when it involves something that a 9-year-old would use to bully other kids.  Trump thus said this , while speaking in the Oval Office the other day: Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president.  I don’t want... I think a president should not have learning disabilities, OK?  I know it’s highly controversial to say such a horrible thing. The president of the United States, Gavin Newscum, admitted that he has learning disabilities, dyslexia... ah... everything about him is dumb. Leaving aside the fact that Trump's fake name for Newsom is simply pathetic (like almost all of Trump's insults, "Li'l Marco" being the only exception ), the obvious story here is that Trump once again showed...

My latest Verdict column is titled From “Fuck the Draft” to “Swinging Dicks”: Appropriate and Inappropriate Vulgarity in Judicial Opinions . It discusses the already-notorious dissent from the denial of  en banc  reconsideration by Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke in Olympus Spa v. Andretti . As I explain in the column, there are two main differences between the use of the phrase "Fuck the Draft" by the lawyer and in the eventual Supreme Court opinion in Cohen v. California versus Judge VanDyke's use of the phrase "swinging dicks" in his Olympus Spa dissent: First, in Cohen,  the question whether the phrase "Fuck the Draft" (written on a jacket worn by the petitioner) was protected free speech was the very heart of the case, whereas Judge VanDyke gratuitously introduced the vulgar "swinging dicks" into Olympus Spa . Second, although no doubt some sensibilities were offended by Cohen's display and its role in Supreme Court litigation...

Anthropic’s complaint against the federal government asserts five claims, the second of which is a First Amendment claim. The main First Amendment theory Anthropic asserts is that the government retaliated against it “for speaking on issues of AI safety and responsible AI use” by designating Anthropic a supply chain risk and requiring every federal agency to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology. In addition to the arguments Anthropic has already made, it likely has an additional, independent, argument for why the government’s actions violated the First Amendment, based on 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis . The short form of the argument is that to give the Pentagon what it wanted, Anthropic would have had to create new Claude models that would be fine with engaging in mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons (so long as they’re legal), and 303 Creative protects Anthropic from being coerced into doing this because Anthropic’s process for creating Claude models—Consti...

I was invited to a dinner this evening that will be attended by, among others, a fair number of students. My hosts asked if I would speak for a bit. Originally, I had thought to give a talk about animal rights but my hosts pointed out that, with the exception of me and perhaps one or two others who would be enjoying the vegan option, most of the assemblage would be eating animal products. My hosts thought that under the circumstances, such a talk might make the other diners uncomfortable. Although I try not to be a judgmental jerk about it, I don't really have a problem with making people uncomfortable about what they eat. That said, on reflection, I took my hosts' admonition to heart because I concluded that the fact that people would be eating dead animal parts while listening to me would make them less receptive to the message than they might be under different circumstances. At my hosts' suggestion, therefore, I'm going to talk about war. The proposal, which I accep...

In January 2025, I took the deliberately provocative position that " Being Unable to Buy a House (as Opposed to Renting) is Generally a Good Thing ."  This morning, I came across Michelle Goldberg's latest  New York Times   op-ed , in which she described having attended a campaign event headlined by one of the recent wave of young, extreme right-wing provocateurs, this one running a fringe campaign for governor of Florida: After [James] Fishback's speech, I met Jeremiah Kimmell, a 22-year-old wearing one of the blue “America First” baseball caps common to [Nick] Fuentes’s movement, and the 20-year-old Charles Metcalf. Kimmell runs a land-clearing business but sees little prospect of an independent adult life. “We live with our parents,” he told me. “We don’t see any end in sight, in that we’re not going to own a home. Something has to change.” Is it possible that the lurch to the anti-democratic, hateful right was driven in part by decades of terrible social messaging...

On Monday, Anthropic sued the federal government in federal district court in California, alleging that the various punitive actions taken by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump are unlawful. The complaint states five causes of action. In addition, in a separate "petition for review" filed in the DC Circuit, Anthropic challenged its designation as a supply-chain risk. The company needed to file two separate actions because the DC Circuit has exclusive original jurisdiction to review supply-chain risk designations but, as an appeals court, generally lacks jurisdiction for other federal question cases. In today's essay, I'm going to discuss just one of the claims in the federal district court complaint. I express no opinion about the other claims in that complaint or about the supply-chain risk complaint. I want to raise a question about Anthropic's contention that the government is retaliating against it for free speech. Recall that Anthrop...

Note to readers: I am more than a bit worn down by writing about the ongoing political insanity in the US (see, for example, my columns from this past Thursday and Friday ), so today's column reflects my conscious decision to take  a brief respite  by disappearing into policy wonkitude.  And what could be wonkier than fiscal policy and retirement in the United States?  Join me, won't you?     A large amount of my academic work has focused on the Social Security system.  More accurately, I have (with one exception, noted below) analyzed only one part of what are in fact three separate parts of Social Security.  The acronym OASDI stands for Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance, which is the official name of the Social Security system.  Those three parts -- traditional retirement benefits, benefits paid to eligible family members after a worker's death, and benefits connected to specific disabilities -- support millions of peo...