Dorf on Law

  by Michael C. Dorf [The following essay first appeared on the blog on July 3, 2017 under the title  Can Non-Sentient Entities Have Interests? (and Other Questions Raised by a Recent Review of Our Book) . I thought it an appropriate piece to re-post as the last classic of the year in light of the urgency questions about abortion have taken on post- Dobbs. I also thought it appropriate, as it reflects not only my views but also Sherry Colb's. The essay takes the form of a response to a book review, but it's more important as an exegesis of a view about when abortion is and isn't immoral, as well as about the proper relation between that kind of question and the law.] The latest issue of  Between the Species , an online philosophy journal, contains  a review  by Philosophy Professor Mylan Engel, Jr., of my book with Professor Sherry Colb,  Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights . (Engel's paper is styled an "article" because it is substantially long...

Note to Readers: For my final "classic" of the holiday season, I continue my theme of looking at the Republican Party in the years before its Trumpian turn.  From just over ten years ago (October 26, 2012), this column discusses what it means to be sociopathic in the political context and how the Republican Party had by 2012 already taken a dramatic turn toward antisocial dysfunction. Calling It As It Is -- Posted by Neil H. Buchanan   In my new  Verdict  column,  published yesterday , I describe the current leadership of the Republican Party -- very much including Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan -- as "sociopathic."  Needless to say, I did not do so lightly.  This is not a matter of mere name-calling, where (for example) Obama-haters empty their limited thesauruses by calling him a communist, fascist, socialistic Kenyan.  All of these words actually have meanings, and sociopathy does as well. As I explain in my column, sociopaths display extreme anti-s...

  by Michael C. Dorf Yesterday the Supreme Court--by a 5-4 shadow docket ruling--extended the stay previously granted by the Chief Justice of a DC Circuit decision that denied Arizona and other states intervention to defend the Title 42 protocols that deny asylum seekers entry into the U.S. via the usual process to which they're entitled. If you had on your Bingo card the Democratic appointees plus Justice Gorsuch dissenting (in a published dissent joined by Justice Jackson), congratulations. That was the lineup in Arizona v. Majorkas . The case as it reaches SCOTUS does not involve the merits. The Court stayed the DC Circuit judgment so that it could resolve only the intervention question following expedited briefing and plenary argument in February. As a practical matter, that means that the Title 42 protocols will remain in effect for now, even though yesterday's per curiam order states that it "precludes giving effect to the District Court order setting aside and vaca...

Note to readers: Frankly, it bothers me that there is nothing new to read or watch this week.  There is very little new content in the major papers, the late-night comedy shows are on hiatus, and pretty much everything else is on autopilot.  This is in part because both Christmas and New Years Day -- which are both legal holidays, notwithstanding (for the former holiday) the separation of church and state (or what remains of it) -- happen to fall on a Sunday this year.  But in any event, everyone seems to be on vacation right now. Including us!  Even Americans, who notoriously refuse to take time off, have decided that this is a dead zone.  But at least we here at Dorf on Law are willing to dig into our archives to find classic columns that resonate with current events.  With the post-midterms discussion having now turned to the once-unimaginable idea that the Republican Party might turn against Donald Trump, I am continuing my Classics theme (which I beg...

 By Eric Segall Many people aren’t working this week or working less, so as Mike and Neil explained yesterday and the day before, we thought it would be a good time to repost timeless essays. This one originally ran in 2015. It asks the question: “What would you do if you were a Supreme Court Justice?” Happy Holidays!

by Michael C. Dorf As Prof Buchanan noted yesterday , for the holidays, we hear at DoL will be running "classics," i.e., reruns. For your reading pleasure, below I reproduce an essay that first ran on Thanksgiving, 2013 . If you're starved for more recent content, you can also check out my latest  Verdict column:  Lessons from Sam Bankman-Fried’s Brief Stay in a Bahamian Jail . Okay, here's the classic: The True Meaning of Thanksgivingukkah Today is "Thanksgivingukkah," the extraordinarily rare--as in  once in 70,000 years --convergence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah. The strange confluence has provided pundits with the opportunity to promote oddball recipes like turkey corpse cooked in Maneschewitz wine or sweet-potato latkes. For me, as both a vegan and an ethnically-identifying-but-non-religious American Jew, the coincidence of these two problematic holidays provides an interesting opportunity for reflection. I find that the two holidays ar...

Note to readers: Beginning today and running through the end of 2022, we here at Dorf on Law will be on our annual December hiatus, as part of which we will re-publish "classic columns" that strike us as relevant and useful reading for those among us who continue to want to engage with ideas over the holidays.  We will, as always, keep our eyes out for breaking news that could inspire and justify writing a new column between now and the 1st, but otherwise, we will be recharging our batteries and wishing all of you the best. by Neil H. Buchanan The column below was first published on August 6, 2009 -- less than three years after the birth of Dorf on Law .  Upon re-reading it, I was depressed anew at how obvious the slide toward authoritarianism has been all along -- long preceding Donald Trump's time in the White House -- and how much worse things have gotten only in degree, but not in kind. In the magazine business, what editors call a "big sentence" (a sentenc...

by Michael C. Dorf “Ours is not a system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a pass." -- Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), member of House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Dec. 19, 2022. -------- In the first years of the current millennium, Vice President Dick Cheney received considerable assistance from talented attorneys who offered at best extremely tendentious arguments for the lawfulness of what Cheney and others in the George W. Bush administration euphemistically termed "enhanced interrogation"--thus greenlighting a policy of torture. The main lawyers involved in the effort--David Addington (as counsel to the VP and known as "Cheney's Cheney"), Jay Bybee (Bush's first head of the Office of Legal Counsel), and John Yoo (Bybee's deputy)--were investigated but not prosecuted for war crimes by a Spanish judge and ultimately suffered only modest reputational conse...

by Neil H. Buchanan Human beings will not be recognizably human forever.  Does that undermine our moral obligation to protect future not-human beings from harm, where possible?  From my perspective, the answer is almost certainly no, but that is because I am an ethical vegan, a viewpoint that quite explicitly defines our moral obligations not exclusively toward humans but toward any beings capable of sentience and the experience of pain.  Humans evolved from apes, going back to trilobites and single-celled organisms, but even if that were not true, the life forms that exist today that meet the threshold of ethical veganism's concerns are still worthy of our moral respect and -- at the very least -- should not be killed or tortured for our own pleasure. I start today's column with this somewhat abstract observation because I want to return to the topic that, bizarrely, Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto collapse has suddenly made relevant: "effective altruism" (EA) and it...

 By Eric Segall This was a no good, terrible, very bad year at the Supreme Court of the United States. Here are my top ten worst moments of 2022 (in no particular order).  This post is not about how much I disagree with almost all of the big cases from 2022 but rather about the moments that should be a reminder to us all that the six conservative justices who now control the highest court in the land are just, well, terrible, even apart from their votes.