Justia columnist and Cornell law professor Michael Dorf isolates an interesting, but also troubling, pattern in the Supreme Court’s thinking, which he calls novelty-skepticism. Dorf notes that novelty-skepticism cuts across doctrinal areas, and defines it as a recent tendency of the Justices to presume that novel forms of legislation are unconstitutional merely in light of their novelty. Dorf offers examples of novelty-skepticism from recent decisions, and urges that the Court ought to give up its novelty-skepticism, for sometimes a new kind of law can be entirely constitutional, and in general, there is no good reason that a new law should have to jump constitutional hurdles that are higher than those that more familiar laws have had to scale.