He was also a politician, a member of the Democratic Party, who was twice elected as the Governor of Georgia (1917–1921) and jurist who served for more than a decade as a superior court judge (1935–1948) in Atlanta.

[3] After working for several years with his father, in 1910, Dorsey was appointed solicitor general of the Atlanta Judicial Circuit by Governor Joseph M. Brown after the death of Charles D.

In 1913, Dorsey was prosecuting attorney (serving as the solicitor general of the Fulton County Superior Court)[7] at the trial of Leo Frank, who was indicted for the murder of young factory worker Mary Phagan.

[2][3] Frank, a Jewish northerner from Brooklyn, was eventually lynched by a mob two months after Governor John Slaton commuted his death sentence to life in prison.

"[12] It was near the end of his final term as governor; he had also just badly lost a race for the U.S. Senate to his former ally Tom Watson, by that point a vocal white supremacist.

[13] Dorsey's speech recited a list of abuses by Georgia whites against African Americans: lynchings, banishments, slavery-like peonage, and physical cruelty.

Historians have debated Dorsey's motivations — from an honest desire for reform to slowing the early stages of the Great Migration to improving Georgia's perception in the eyes of Northern capitalists.

Dorsey's involement in the Williams Plantation Murders has documented in two books, Lay This Body Down by Gregory A. Freeman (1999) and Hell Put to Shame by Earl Swift (2024).