A law professor reacted to the Supreme Court ruling 6-3 to strike down President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship Tuesday by arguing that any colleagues who opposed the decision should face “repercussions” for their “parasitic” behavior.
Legal academics flooded social media platforms after the Supreme Court handed down its decision defending birthright citizenship by 5 to 4, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh not finding that its enshrined in the 14th Amendment despite concurring on blocking Trump’s order. Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff took to the microblogging app Bluesky on Tuesday to lambast those who disagreed with the majority’s opinion.
“There MUST be repercussions for the lawprofs who advanced such untenable arguments,” Pfaff’s post read. “Their behavior is — and I mean this literally, not dehumanizingly — parasitic.”
“They exploit norms of collegiality and presumptions of integrity to advance trash,” Pfaff wrote. “Which undermines the work of ALL of us.” (RELATED: Ketanji Brown Jackson Uses Gen Z Slang In Birthright Citizenship Opinion)
“If there are no costs to that — and only the upside to fancy dinners funded by antidemocratic oligarchs and the ‘nonpartisan institutions’ they have endowed — then we can only reward this behavior,” the professor continued. “Everyone involved in this canard should be frozen out of academic life until they recant.”
“Academics cannot simultaneously complain about the inability for facts and reality to drive policy while simultaneously refusing to confront the fabulists in our midst. Wurman et al do not just demean originalism or history. They demean ALL of us, by making ALL of us less credible.”
Ah yes, time to push for that traditional tool of academic thought and freedom—the recantation! pic.twitter.com/yFlBlsjaW7
— Ilan Wurman (@ilan_wurman) July 1, 2026
Ilan Wurman, mentioned by Pfaff, is a constitutional scholar and law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. His extensive work on the citizenship clause was cited three times in Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissenting opinion — joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch — in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case.
Harvard Law School professor Adrianne Vermuele expressed outrage over Pfaff’s comments. He told the Daily Caller, “It is intolerably absurd to try to ‘cancel’ Professor Wurman and others for making a novel argument that came within a whisker of winning at the Supreme Court, and that fundamentally changed the terms of debate; it seems to me that that is by definition excellent legal academic work.”
“And it is even more absurd when one considers that legal academics who make specious arguments that the Supreme Court rejects 9-0, like the argument for the ballot disqualification of [President] Donald Trump, face no ‘repercussions’ whatsoever,” Vermuele added.
Wurman told the Caller, “My sense is that most academics find these modern-day inquisitioners to be more distasteful than my dissenting scholarship. Many have acknowledged to me, mostly privately but also sometimes publicly, that the birthright citizenship question is indeed a hard one from a textual and historical perspective.”
Pfaff responded to his own posts Wednesday by saying he thought his language was “too blunt.” “I stand by the idea, but I should have phrased it better. Academic freedom is the right to say what you want, without INSTITUTIONAL repercussions (generally). But it’s not the right to speak w NO repercussions,” Pfaff wrote.
“Ideally, bad work is self-sanctioning: it gets ignored,” he continued. “That, though, is not what happened here. An idea [with] no prior historical support gained enough traction after an aggressive post-EO campaign to nearly sway a SCOTUS majority. That sets a dangerous precedent.”
Pfaff did not respond to the Caller’s request for comment.
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