About

Ryan Doerfler is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, with a research focus on the role of the judiciary within a democratic system. His recent work includes a critical reassessment of the embrace of judicial review within the liberal legal tradition and an analysis of the relationship between theories of statutory and constitutional interpretation and a fundamental commitment to democratic self-rule. His academic contributions have been published in numerous leading law journals, and his popular writing has appeared in prominent outlets such as the Atlantic, Dissent, Jacobin, the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Ryan graduated from Wake Forest University with a BA in philosophy, earned a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University, and obtained a JD from Harvard Law School. Prior to his current position, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Library science
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• The Post-Legitimacy Court

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• After Courts: Democratizing Statutory Law

  Michigan Law Review · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton argued for locating interpretive authority over law separately from those institutions tasked with formulating it. Hamilton’s vision, never accurate as a description of American practice, has not been credible for a long time. To the extent enormous power is still allocated to judges, our legal institutions have been out of step with our legal theory, which has long regarded them as political actors and policymakers. More practically, every term it is clearer and clearer that the role of the Supreme Court in statutory cases (including checking administrative rulemaking and other processes) is, if anything, more menacing than its role in the rare instances when it deploys its heaviest weaponry of constitutional invalidation. Against progressive calls to reclaim the judiciary, this Article extends our proposal to disempower courts exercising lawmaking authority—to include when they are interpreting statutes alone. Indeed, the same considerations that counsel the constitutional disempowerment of courts counsel their statutory disempowerment, and the allocation or reallocation of their authority over law to politically accountable agents. The heart of our Article offers a survey of court disempowerment strategies and tools, which are comparable to, though not identical with, the disempowerment mechanisms that have been proposed in the arena of constitutional reform. Such strategies and tools are appealing in the short term; but the long term requires a fuller rethinking of our institutions of legal interpretation. Available and existing disempowerment strategies for courts are best conceived as early and partial versions of full-scale allocation of interpretive authority over law to “political” branches and openly political control. [Judges] have battered their way to supremacy with their double axes; one edge is the control over legislation by its unconstitutionality, the other is such free interpretation of statutes as suits their purposes. —Learned Hand

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• We Are Already Defying the Supreme Court

  Dissent · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT: The idea of disregarding the U.S. Supreme Court—simply ignoring its decisions—has become a flash point. "Americans will not tolerate defiance of the institution and the rule of law," remarked one conservative law professor, irate about the possibility that President Joe Biden or other political officials might engage in such behavior. Who has defied the Supreme Court in the past? If leading examples include Andrew Jackson the ethnic cleansing populist or George Wallace the Southern segregationist, the answer has to be: no one good.

  PublisherDOI

• We Are Already Defying the Supreme Court

  Dissent · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT: The idea of disregarding the U.S. Supreme Court—simply ignoring its decisions—has become a flash point. “Americans will not tolerate defiance of the institution and the rule of law,” remarked one conservative law professor, irate about the possibility that President Joe Biden or other political officials might engage in such behavior. Who has defied the Supreme Court in the past? If leading examples include Andrew Jackson the ethnic cleansing populist or George Wallace the Southern segregationist, the answer has to be: no one good.

  PublisherDOI

• Late-Stage Textualism

  The Supreme Court Review · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Democratizing the Supreme Court

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  Progressives are taking Supreme Court reform seriously for the first time in almost a century. Owing to the rise of the political and academic left following the 2008 financial crisis and the hotly contested appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, progressives increasingly view the Supreme Court as posing a serious challenge to the successful implementation of ambitious legislation like the “Green New Deal.” Despite this once-in-a-generation energy around the idea of court reform, the popular and academic discussion of how to reform the Supreme Court has been unduly constrained and is now at risk of closing prematurely. This is the case with regard to its mechanism and its purpose alike. On the left, historical memory has limited debate almost entirely to “court packing.” Meanwhile the center has occupied itself with how to restore the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, rescuing the institution from its regrettable slide into partisanship. And now with the Court appearing to moderate to preempt legislative reform of the institution, the concern is that progressives will drop their demands for change, satisfied with a few modest judicial concessions. This Article aims to keep the discussion of court reform alive and, just as importantly, to significantly expand its bounds. It does so, first, by urging progressives to reject the legitimacy frame of the issue, which treats the problem with the Supreme Court as one of politicization, in favor of an openly progressive frame in which the question is how to enable democracy within our constitutional scheme. Second, the Article introduces a distinction between two fundamentally different mechanisms of reform. The first type of reform, which we call personnel reforms, includes both aggressive proposals like court packing and more modest (or politically moderate) reforms such as partisan balance requirements or panel systems. All of these reforms take for granted the tremendous power the Supreme Court wields. What these proposals do is change the partisan or ideological character of the individuals who wield it. The second type, which we call disempowering reforms, include things like jurisdiction stripping and a supermajority requirement for judicial review. These reforms take power away from the Court, redirecting it to the political branches instead. As we argue, personnel reforms are mostly addressed to the legitimacy frame that progressives would do well to reject. More still, to the extent such reforms advance progressive ends, they do so only contingently and threaten to do as much harm as good over time. By contrast, disempowering reforms, we argue, advance progressive values systematically. While such reforms would not guarantee advances in social democracy, they would ensure that the battle for such advances takes place in the democratic arena, which for progressives is where they have to occur now—and should occur—if they take place anywhere.

  Publisher

• The Ghost of John Hart Ely

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Late-Stage Textualism

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The "Ambiguity" Fallacy

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Going 'Clear'

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Samuel Moyn

  Yale University

  7 shared

• William Baude

  6 shared