Michael C. Dorf

Michael C. Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He has authored or co-authored well over one hundred scholarly articles and essays for law reviews, books, and peer-reviewed science and social science journals. He is the co-author (with Laurence H. Tribe) of On Reading the Constitution (Harvard University Press, 1991), the co-author (with Trevor Morrison) of The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2010), the editor of Constitutional Law Stories (Foundation Press 2004, second edition 2009), the author of No Litmus Test: Law Versus Politics in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), the co-author (with Sherry F. Colb) of Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights (Columbia University Press, 2016), and a co-editor of the 12th, 13th, and 14th editions of the Choper et al constitutional law casebook (West, 2015, 2019, 2023), the annual supplement thereto, and the annual compact version of the casebook, Leading Cases.

Dorf is a member of an inter-disciplinary team at Cornell that conducts federal grant-funded research on the relative efficacy of various formats of cigarette and e-cigarette warnings. That research has led so far to the publication of ten scientific papers on which he is a co-author.

Professor Dorf writes a bi-weekly column for Justia's web magazine Verdict and posts several times per week on his own blog, Dorf on Law. He is also an occasional contributor to other magazines, newspapers, and blogs.

A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Dorf spent the year between college and law school as a Rotary Scholar in the physics department at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2008, Dorf taught at Rutgers-Camden Law School for three years and at Columbia Law School for thirteen years. At Columbia, he served as vice dean for four years and was the Isidor & Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law.

Dorf maintains an active pro bono practice that chiefly consists of writing amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases.