essay on law and politics

Keith E. Whittington

William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics

Princeton University

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Law and Politics: Critical Concepts in Political Science

Law and politics are deeply intertwined.   Law is an essential tool of government action, an instrument with which government tries to influence society.   Law is also the means by which government itself is structured, regulated and controlled.   It is no surprise, then, that law is an important prize in the political struggle and that law shapes how politics is conducted.

The scholarly study of law and politics is a growing and diverse field.   The range of scholarship in the area reflects the wide scope of issues and questions that are relevant to the field of law and politics and that invite new and further study.   The diversity of scholarly interest in law and politics also reflects the interdisciplinary conversation that the field invites.

Law and Politics covers this ground as a new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in Political Science.   Along with a new introduction by the editor, the four-volume collection brings together the best of canonical and cutting-edge works in the field.   It provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of law and politics and will stand as an essential research resource for scholars and students alike.

The first volume in the collection focuses on jurisprudence and constitutionalism and assembles key works examining such basic question as what is law and what purposes do constitutions serve.   The second volume turns its attention to how courts operate and how judges make their decisions, examining the judicial process from trial courts to appellate courts.   The third volume focuses on the relationship between law and society and takes up the intersection between the legal process and social actors, considering such issues as how ordinary people think about the law and how legal compliance works.   The final volume considers law, courts and politics in an international and comparative perspective, bringing together research on such topics as the foundations of judicial independence and the relationship between law and economic development.

Volume 1: Jurisprudence and Constitutionalism

General Introduction

Introduction

1.       The Path of the Law

Oliver Wendell Holmes

2.       Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals

H.L.A. Hart

3.       Positivism and Fidelity to Law – A Reply to Professor Hart

4.       Authority and Justification

5.       Law as Interpretation

Ronald M. Dworkin

6.       Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern

Charles Howard McIlwain

7.       The Constitution as an Institution

Karl N. Llewellyn

8.       Constitutionalism

9.       Constitutional Dictatorship

Clinton Rossiter

10.   The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law

James Bradley Thayer

11.   Democracy and Distrust

John Hart Ely

12.   The Core of the Case Against Judicial Review

Jeremy Waldron

13.   “The Constitution” in American Civil Religion

Sanford Levinson

Volume 2: Judicial Politics

14.   Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker

Robert A. Dahl

15.   The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited

Jeffrey A. Segal and Harold J. Spaeth

16.   What Do Judges and Justices Maximize? (The Same Thing Everybody Else Does)

Richard A. Posner

17.   Elements of Judicial Strategy

Walter F. Murphy

18.   Informative Precedent and Intrajudicial Communication

Ethan Bueno De Mesquita and Matthew C. Stephenson

19.   Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court’s Certiorari Decisions

Charles M. Cameron, Jeffrey A. Segal, and Donald R. Songer

20.   Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court

Gregory A. Caldeira and John R. Wright

21.   The Nonmajoritarian Difficulty: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary

Mark A. Graber

22.   How Political Parties Can Use Courts to Advance Their Agendas: Federal Courts in the United States, 1875-1891

Howard Gillman

23.   Legislative-Judicial Relations: A Game Theoretic Approach to Constitutional Review

Georg Vanberg

24.   The Separation of Powers, Court Curbing, and Judicial Legitimacy

Tom S. Clark

25.   Congressional Influence on Bureaucracy

John A. Ferejohn and Charles R. Shipan

26.   A Spatial Model of Roll Call Voting: Senators, Constituents, Presidents, and Interest Groups in Supreme Court Confirmations

Jeffrey A. Segal, Charles M. Cameron, and Albert D. Cover

27.   Republican Schoolmaster: The U.S. Supreme Court, Public Opinion and Abortion

Charles H. Franklin and Liane C. Kosaki

28.   The Least Dangerous Branch Revisited: New Evidence on Supreme Court Responsiveness to Public Preferences

Kevin T. McGuire and James A. Stimson

29.   Accountability and Coercion: Is Justice Blind When It Runs for Office?

Gregory A. Huber and Sanford Gordon

Volume 3: Law and Society

30.   Whigs and Hunters

E.P. Thompson

31.   The People’s Welfare

William J. Novak

32.   Adversarial Legalism and American Government

Robert A. Kagan

33.   The Problem of Social Cost

Ronald H. Coase

34.   Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative

Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey

35.   Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law

Lauren Beth Edelman

36.   The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming and Claiming

William L.F. Felstiner , Richard L. Abel, and Austin Sarat

37.   Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change

Marc Galanter

38.   The Hollow Hope

Gerald N. Rosenberg

39.   Acting When Elected Officials Won’t: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions, 1935-85

Paul Frymer

40.   Why Do We Punish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment

Kevin M. Carlsmith , John M. Darley, and Paul H. Robinson

41.   The Culture of High Crime Societies

David Garland

42.   The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing

Jason Sunshine and Tom R. Tyler

43.   Distorting the Law

William Haltom and Michael W. McCann

Volume 4: Comparative and International Issues

44.   Courts

Martin Shapiro

45.   The Puzzling (In)dependence of Courts: A Comparative Approach

J. Mark Ramseyer

46.   Judicial Independence in Unstable Environments, Argentina 1935-1998

Matias Iaryczower , Pablo T. Spiller, and Mariano Tommasi

47.   On the Legitimacy of National High Courts

James L. Gibson, Gregory A. Caldeira, and Venessa A. Baird

48.   Constitutional Courts vs. Religious Fundamentalism: Three Middle Eastern Tales

Ran Hirschl

49.   Constitutions and Commitments: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England

Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast

50.   Judicial Checks and Balances

Rafael La Porta , Florencio Lopez-de- Silanes , Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Andrei Schleifer

51.   The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation

Daron Acemoglu , Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson

52.   Presidents and Assemblies

Matthew Soberg Shugart and John M. Carey

53.   The Endurance of National Constitutions

Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton

54.   Globalization in Search of Justification: Toward a Theory of Comparative Constitutional Interpretation

Sujit Choudhry

55.   The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe

Andrew Moravcsik

56.   International Law and State Behavior: Commitment and Compliance in International Monetary Affairs

Beth A. Simmons

57.   Hard and Soft Law in International Governance

Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal

Routledge Press

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December 2012

1600 pages, cloth

ISBN: 978-0-415-68035-6

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Ideals and practices in the rule of law: an essay on legal politics.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

This essay responds to the three commentators in the symposium on my book, Law's Fragile State , by describing the sociolegal study of the rule of law as an investigation into both a set of ideals (the rule of law as a normative question) and a set of practices (the rule of law as an empirical question). Studying the rule of law involves understanding the contingent nature of its ideals as well as investigating the actual work that lawyers, judges, state officials, aid workers, activists, and others have done in specific contexts to promote legal remedies to social or political ills. These overlapping layers of the study of the rule of law—ideals and practices, normative and empirical—provide a sociolegal framework for understanding the successes and failures of legal work and, ultimately, how citizens experience state power in democratic and nondemocratic societies alike.

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• Volume 41, Issue 2
• Mark Fathi Massoud
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/lsi.12196

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In the Preface to our inaugural issue, then-Circuit Judge Antonin Scalia issued the following charge:

     "Resolving the tension between the rule of law and the will of the people - between law and politics - is the supreme task of our government system. We sometimes tend to forget that it is more a matter of resolving tensions than of drawing lines, for there is no clear demarcation between the two. Laws are made, and even interpreted and applied (by administrative agencies), through a political process; and politics are conducted under the constitution and statutory constraints of the law.      "This new journal is meant to give that interplay the scholarly attention it deserves. It will examine the impact of law upon the processes and outcomes of our elections, and upon the victor's ability to reflect the popular will once in office. Conversely, it will examine the extent to which the popular will, brought to bear through the election of new executive officers and their congressional overseers, and through the desire of many of those officials to be reelected, can and should affect the interpretation and application of existing laws."

The Honorable Antonin Scalia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia October 28, 1983 Washington, D.C.

Under the guidance of Justice Scalia, the Journal of Law & Politics , an entirely student-run publication at the University of Virginia School of Law , was founded in 1983 to provide a forum through which to analyze, discuss and debate the role of law in the political process and the role of politics in the legal system.  Over the past quarter-century, the Journal has stayed faithful to its original mission and today remains the only non-partisan publication devoted exclusively to examining the interaction between law and politics

Published two to three times a year, the Journal consists of articles, essays, book reviews, and commentaries by scholars, practitioners, national political leaders, and students focusing on issues at the cross-roads of law and politics: the role of the judiciary in making law, the relationship of the three branches of government, federalism, the politics of the judicial appointment process, voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, voter initiatives, ethics investigations, the politics of education, and religious freedom in a pluralist society.

As the only publication of its kind, the Journal boasts a proud and distinguished history of contributors. Of course, many of the Journal 's pages have been filled with pieces by prominent professors from the nation's top universities and law schools. Nevertheless, the Journal also maintains a steadfast commitment to publishing works by authors from outside the academic realm. The Journal has published a number of luminary jurists including Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Byron White, and a dozen federal circuit court judges. Numerous members of Congress have also written for the Journal , including Senators Warren Rudman, Mitch McConnell, Strom Thurmond, and Orrin Hatch, and Representatives David McIntosh and Robert Livingston. Other notable authors from outside the professorate include Robert Bork, Ralph Nader, Ed Meese, Theodore Olson, former Secretary of Education Lauro Cavaso, and Gary Bauer. The Journal has also published representatives from such diverse institutions as the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the Department of Justice, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Democratic Leadership Council, the U.S. Catholic Conference, and the Common Cause.

The Journal has played an influential role in the courts and the legal academy. Over the years, the Journal has been cited by the Courts of Appeals for the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and D.C. Circuits, the supreme courts of Colorado, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and a dozen lower federal and state courts. In addition, Journal articles have been cited hundreds of times in academic articles and anthologized in a number of books.

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Law as Politics: Reflections on the Critical Legal Studies Movement

2018, SCLS Law Review Vol 1 No 2

Critical Legal Studies (hereinafter CLS) movement of the U.S. marked the combination of a legal way of thought and a social network of left leaning legal scholars of 1970s. Though loosely constructed as a legal theory, CLS lacks the ingredients necessary for a full pledged legal theory. It is rather better described as anetwork of like-minded legal scholars at Harvard and a way of legal thought.1 Prominent among the scholars were Roberto Unger,Duncan Kennedy, David Kennedy, Morton Horwitz, Jack Balkin, Mark Tushnet and Louis Michael Seidman. As is put by Roberto Unger, though CLS was meant to be “continued as an organizing force only until the late 1980s,…its founders never meant it to become an ongoing school of thought or genre of writing.” Yet the movement became a very powerful school of thought popularised throughout America and the rest of the world. CLS has been perceived both as a reaction to legal Formalism and Realism and a distinct theory of law.

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Critical Legal Studies (CLS): Contextualizing the Jurisprudential Basis, Nature And Scope

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This paper analyzes the Critical Legal Studies movement, the key proponents; their main contribution to jurisprudential debate(s); and the attendant criticisms against their philosophy.

Emmanuel Caliwan, J.D.

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The objective of this paper is to analyze the factors that led to the decline of Critical Legal Studies from the 1990s. At first, we will analyze the emergence of critical theories of Law in the 1960s. We will then investigate the emergence of postmodern legal movements, placing Critical Legal Studies in this process. Finally, we will evaluate the impact of neoliberalism on the work of Critical Legal Studies.

Law and Contemporary Problems

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smita tripathy

This is my project work on Critical Legal Studies Movement which roots can be traced back to the development of legal realism. In this article I have tried to define the characteristics of this movement, its theme and its contribution to the further development in the society like rise of feminist movement and critical race theory. Although CLS movement is not in such a grown up stage so that it could be taken as alternative of liberal legalism, however, it cannot be denied that it has played a crucial role to challenge the preexisting norms in our society and tried to make the world a better place for all.

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LAW AND POLITICS ( PART 1)

DR. MIRO CERAR

ABSTRACT: This article examines some basic characteristics of the relationship between national and international law and politics. The law functions in relation to politics in three basic aspects, namely as a goal, a  means, or an obstacle. First, politics can define certain predominantly legal values or institutions as its goal. In this case the political understanding of these values or institutions becomes almost identical to an authentic legal understanding of the same values or institutions. Second, politics can comprehend the law merely as a means for the fulfillment of certain political interests. In this case politics is neutral in its attitude toward the law. Finally, politics can interpret law as an obstacle on the way toward the realization of certain political goals. In this situation either politics prevails over law, or vice versa. In the first case politics effectuates its solutions at the expense of the rule of law, while in the second case the autonomy of law is preserved through the  decisions of the highest courts or by other actions taken by lawyers, intellectuals, associations, organizations, and the public in order to stop illicit acts of political actors. Law and politics create their own particular pictures of reality. Sometimes those pictures overlap, sometimes they differ. Yet, there is something that the law should never include in its sphere; namely, the differentiation of adversaries according to a purely political criterion. This leads to a strict separation between “ours” and “yours”, or, in its most radical expression, to a strict separation between friend and enemy. When the latter occurs, politics inevitably prevails over the law, and reduces or damages the autonomy of the rule of law.

I. INTRODUCTION

This article examines some basic characteristics of the relationship between national and international law l and politics. The subject is obviousiy much iuu cumpiex io be deait wiih in aii possibie aspects here; however, some fundamental issues of theoretical and practical, importance are presented with special emphasis. For example, there is an argument to be made that certain checks and balances between law and politics are critical for the relatively peaceful and value-positive (constructive) development of mankind and democratically organized societies. The relatively high level of the autonomy of modern law 2 is one of the most significant factors that define the limits of politics and thus contributes to the constructive development of different societies.

II. STARTING POINT PERSPECTIVES ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICS AND LAW

Law and politics as social phenomena are two emanations of the same entity (a monistic ontological conception), regarding which their separate existence is only a consequence of a human dualistic or pluralistic perception of the world (a dualistic ontological conception).  Furthermore, the difference between law and politics is, from a deeper ontological perspective, in fact only illusory, for reason of which also in the fields of legal and political theory and philosophy there are conclusions regarding the partial or complete overlapping of law and politics, sometimes even the equating of the two that raises a crucial question of how both notions are defined. Regardless of such findings, the distinction (i.e. consciously persisting in a distinction) between law and politics at the current level of human development is necessary and indispensable. With politics, it is necessary to distinguish three fundamental dimensions: the institutional dimension, the normative dimension, and the process-related dimension. The institutional dimension is expressed by the term polity and entails the operation of various regulated state and non-state institutions like political parties, social movements, public   media, the legislature, and the government. The normative dimension is  expressed by the term policy and entails the creation of normative ideas or ideals that define basic societal values and objectives geared towards a practical realization of such. Lastly, the process-related dimension is expressed by the term politics, which is expressed in the formation of the political will through the implementation of the social power and authority and built up through conflict and consensus.   If we attempt to concisely analyze the law through the above mentioned three dimensions, we can see that from an institutional perspective, the law is expressed primarily through two factors: the establishment of specific state bodies legitimized by means of their specific professional legal structure and functioning (e.g., the courts and the state prosecutor’s office), and non-state institutions where the attorneyship belongs. From the normative perspective, the law is the creation of general and individual legal norms. From the process-related perspective, the law appears by means of various procedures like the legislative or criminal procedures where legal solutions are formed through the functioning of state bodies and individuals.

In this text, I will discuss politics in its broadest meaning, primarily encompassing the process-related sense, which also includes various policies and polities. I will define law as the binding value-normative system established and carried out by, the state in national law and carried out by international organizations and institutions in international law, which are intended for the establishment and maintenance of a balance between justice and order and solving and preventing pressing societal and international conflicts.

The relation between politics and law has both a progressive function and a safeguarding function. Law and politics, separately or together, both encourage and suppress the development of societal relations, while they both also function to bring about justice and order. The essence of their “separate and connected” but not integral existence is to help set each other’s borders. These borders prevent excessive one-sidedness in politics or the law, similar to a “checks and balances” mechanism. In actuality, all legal institutes are a partial reflection of individual or collective political decisions at a certain time and in a certain environment, which have assumed a legal form and nature. This is true in systems where the main rule-framer is an extremely politically legitimized body (e.g. the parliament as legislature) and also in systems  where judicial-precedent law has a strong influence because even the  most autonomous judiciary is always determined by some sort of political influence. 4 Legal institutes, however, have a reverse influence on politics in that they limit and direct politics as part of a wider legal awareness, or specific legal ideology.

In a mutual relationship, politics and law do not have constantly determined roles, since in different periods they can be, either in agreement or in opposition, socially progressive or conservative, or even reactionary. But, it must be stressed that for law an especially emphasized conservative functionS is characteristic and important, despite the fact that it can sometimes function in a developmentally progressive or creative manner. This doesn’t suggest that law cannot be successful in promoting new societal relations but it does suggest that  only from the aspect of legal policy, this should not be exaggerated. Most often, but not always, it is better to encourage those mechanisms through which the legal order reacts quickly and effectively to the emerging social circumstances and prevents the possibility of one-sidedness or exaggerated aspirations of politics.

It is an immanent characteristic of every law that it is also the means of certain politics. 6 However, law is never a pure form through which political content would be realized, since it is in the very nature of law to be relatively autonomous or independent. 7 Politics cannot exist without  the law, since the law forms it and keeps it within certain limits that are  dictated above all by the ideas of justice and social order. But, law could not exist without politics, since politics gives law its driving force and its “rough content” or substance, which law then adapts to its autonomous framework and develops its final form, expressing it in a specific normative manner. Thus, one of the most demanding tasks of every society is to continuously attempt to establish and maintain an appropriate balance between politics and law. This relationship is completely different in an authoritarian or totalitarian state as compared to a democratic state based on the rule of law. This is because in an authoritarian or totalitarian state, the “legal policy” is a subordinate to the  “political policy.” This is in contrast to a democratic state where there is a dynamic, partner-competitor relationship between the two policies where sometimes politics prevails and other times the law prevails.

In democratic orders, modern law and politics, as a general rule, intensively confront one another in legislative and other parliamentary procedures. This is where the influence of politics on law is the strongest. Nevertheless, modern law maintains a great amount of autonomy. This autonomy is achieved through: the fact that interest groups never fully determine the decisions of a pluralistic legislative body or could direct such body exclusively according to political preferences; substantive and procedural legal rules, which to a large degree determine the limiting framework where the legislature operates and creates certain parliamentary practice (routine), which it is difficult to depart from (the predominance of legal formalism); and the independent judiciary that limits excessive political aspirations and places them within the legal limits of functioning. 8 What is especially important today in many countries is the role of constitutional courts. These courts, as a general rule, routinely interfere with the politically conditioned and interwoven activities of the legislative and executive branches of power, and therefore their decisions are naturally more or less politically colored. Finally, a certain level of legal awareness can be added to all this. Legal awareness always develops in political actors and directs them as an internal commitment to observing fundamental legal values and the existing law.

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Wheeler-Dealing: An Essay on Law, Politics, and Speech

Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 15, pp. 263-278, 1988

9 Pages Posted: 30 Mar 2010

Allan Hutchinson

York University - Osgoode Hall Law School

Melinda Jones

La Trobe University

Date Written: 1988

Few matters seem to arouse greater feeling than local politics and sport. Each reflects and reinforces common qualities of robust partisanship and vigorous exercise. When the two combine, tempers are guaranteed to run very high. This unpropitious state of affairs occurred in Leicester in the spring of 1984. The city of Leicester has a significant and established black community; about twenty-five per cent of the population are of Asian or Afro-Caribbean origins. Leicester City Council was firmly committed to racial equality. In particular, it supported the Gleneagles Agreement made in 1977 between Commonwealth countries which encouraged "taking every practical step to discourage contact with sporting organisations from South Africa". When the English rugby team organised a tour to South Africa and selected three Leicester: players, the council considered the gauntlet to be thrown firmly at its feet. The council allowed the Leicester Rugby Football Club to use a recreation ground for Second XV matches and general training; the First XV played elsewhere.

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Allan Hutchinson (Contact Author)

York university - osgoode hall law school ( email ).

4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada (416) 736-5048 (Phone)

La Trobe University ( email )

Department of Economics and Finance Victoria 3552, 3086 Australia

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Something Has Gone Deeply Wrong at the Supreme Court

Jurists who preach fidelity to the Constitution are making decisions that flatly contradict our founding document’s text and ideals.

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F orget Donald Trump . Forget Joe Biden. Think instead about the Constitution. What does this document, the supreme law of our land, actually say about ​​lawsuits against ex-presidents?

Nothing remotely resembling what Chief Justice John Roberts and five associate ​justices declared​ in yesterday’s disappointing Trump v. United States decision​. The Court’s curious and convoluted majority opinion turns the Constitution’s text and structure inside out and upside down, saying things that are flatly contradicted by the document’s unambiguous letter and obvious spirit.​

Imagine a simple hypothetical designed to highlight the key constitutional clauses that should have been the Court’s starting point: In the year 2050, when Trump and Biden are presumably long gone, David Dealer commits serious drug crimes and then bribes President Jane Jones to pardon him.

Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court puts Trump above the law

Is Jones acting as president, in her official capacity, when she pardons Dealer? Of course. She is pardoning qua president. No one else can issue such a pardon. The Constitution expressly vests this power in the president: “The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.”

But the Constitution also contains express language that a president who takes a bribe can be impeached for bribery and then booted from office: “The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” And once our hypothetical President Jones has been thus removed and is now ex-President Jones, the Constitution’s plain text says that she is subject to ordinary criminal prosecution, just like anyone else: “In cases of Impeachment … the Party convicted shall … be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

Obviously, in Jones’s impeachment trial in the Senate, all sorts of evidence is admissible to prove not just that she issued the pardon but also why she did this—to prove that she had an unconstitutional motive , to prove that she pardoned Dealer because she was bribed to do so. Just as obviously, in the ensuing criminal case, all of this evidence surely must be allowed to come in.

But the Trump majority opinion, ​written by Roberts, says otherwise​, ​proclaim​ing that “courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” ​In a later footnote all about bribery, the Roberts opinion says that criminal-trial courts are not allowed to “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”

​​But ​​​such an inspection is​​​​ exactly what the Constitution itself plainly calls for​​​. An impeachment court and, later, a criminal court would have to​​ determine whether Jones pardoned Dealer because she thought he was innocent, or because she thought he had already suffered enough, or because he put money in her pocket for the very purpose of procuring the pardon. The smoking gun may well be in Jones’s diary—her “private records”​—​or in a recorded Oval Office conversation with Jones’s “advisers,” as​ was the case in the Watergate scandal​​​. Essentially, the​ Court ​in Trump v. United States ​is declaring the Constitution itself unconstitutional​.​​ Instead of properly starting with the Constitution’s text and structure, the ​​Court has ended up repealing them​​.

In a quid-pro-quo bribery case—money for a pardon—Roberts apparently would allow evidence of the quid (the money transfer) and evidence of the quo (the fact of a later pardon) but not evidence of the pro: evidence that the pardon was given because of the money, that the pardon was motivated by the money. This is absurd.

In the oral argument this past April, one of the Court’s best jurists posed the issue well: “Giving somebody money isn’t bribery unless you get something in exchange, and if what you get in exchange is [an] official act … how does [the case] go forward?” The answer, of course, is by allowing evidence of all three legs of the bribery stool—the quid (the money), the quo (the official act), and the pro (the unconstitutional and vicious motive). Yet Roberts’s majority opinion entirely misses the thrust of this oral-argument episode.

Claire Finkelstein and Richard W. Painter: Trump’s presidential-immunity theory is a threat to the chain of command

This is astonishing, because the impressive jurist who shone in this oral exchange was none other than the chief justice himself. John Roberts, meet John Roberts.

And please meet the John Roberts who has long believed that the judiciary shouldn’t be partisan. Over the course of his career, Roberts has repeatedly said that there are no Republican justices or Democratic justices, no Trump justices or Obama justices or Biden justices—there are just justices, period. Yet the ​​Court​ in Trump v. United States ​ split along sharply partisan lines—six Republican​ appointees,​​ three of whom were named to the Court by Trump himself,​ versus three Democrat​ic appointees​​​. ​Roberts failed to pull these sides together​​.

This is precisely the opposite of what happened in the celebrated ​​​decision United States v. Nixon ​​, also known as the Nixon-tapes case, in which​ the Court​—including three justices appointed by Richard Nixon himself—issued a unanimous no-man-is-above-the-law ruling against the president. (A fourth Nixon appointee—William Rehnquist, for whom a young Roberts later clerked—recused himself.) The ​opinion​​​ also made clear that presidential conversations with top aides are indeed admissible when part of a criminal conspiracy.

​​​​Yesterday’s liberal dissenters came much closer to the constitutional mark, but they, too, made mistakes. ​The​ir​​ biggest blunder in Trump was relying on a 1982 case, Nixon v. Fitzgerald , that simply invented out of whole cloth broad immunity for ex-presidents in civil cases. If liberal precedents lacking strong roots in the Constitution, such as Roe v. Wade , are fair game for conservatives, then mistaken conservative precedents ​ought to​​ be fair game for liberals. Fitzgerald made stuff up, and ​the liberals should have said​ so.

No one is above the law​—or, at least, no one should be​. Not presidents, not ex-presidents, and not justices either. Because the Constitution itself is our highest law, jurists across the spectrum must prioritize that document’s letter and spirit above all else. In Trump v. United States , the Court failed to do this and also failed to live up to America’s highest ideals: nonpartisan justice and the rule of law.

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Good Example Of Law Is Politics Essay

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Topic: Supreme Court , Criminal Justice , Crime , Relationships , Politics , Sociology , Law , Government

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Published: 03/03/2020

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Cerar (2010, p.4) “stated that it is an imminent characteristic of every law that it is also the means of certain politics”. It bears to stress, however, that law cannot be considered as a pure form through which the political content may be achieved since it is in the very nature of law to become independent or autonomous since it can stand on its own. However, in the case of politics, it cannot exist without the law for it is the law which gives its structure and maintains it within certain limits that are dictated by the concepts of justice and social order (Cerar, 2010. However, law cannot exist without politics since politics gives law the motivation or the driving force, along with its substance and content. Hence, the law has to adapt to its autonomous structure for it to be developed into its final form and being expressed in a specific normative manner (Cerar, 2010). Maintaining a proper balance between politics and law is a challenging task. Law and politics are related in such a way that politics is the will and that law is reason (Post, 2010). The best perspective that can be used in analyzing “law is politics” is by using the perspective that should law can be considered as a weapon and power to resolve social conflict (Turk, 2004). Law promotes social values since it is characterized as a means to settle disputes by articulating the requirements of the idea of justice (Turk, 1978, p 214). On the other hand, politics has a relationship to the law in the sense that constitutional conventions and ratifications are part of the political process (Bayles, 1978, p.138). It is politics that created the constitution, and thus politics establishes legal order. This relationship between laws and politics is completely different in an authoritarian or totalitarian state in comparison to a democratic state based on the rule of law. The rationale behind this is due to the fact that the authoritarian or totalitarian state which creates the legal policy is a subordinate to the political policy (Cerar, 2010). This is opposed to the democratic state where a dynamic, partner-competitor relationship exists between the two policies wherein there will be times when the politics prevail, and other times it shall be the law which will reign. The dependence of law on politics is based on an analytical relationship that it is impossible for a legal system to exist without the rule of recognition that is generally accepted by the government officials (Bayles, 1978). A legal system shall only become successful if there is a union of primary and secondary rules that creates the constitutional structure of the state. It shall be dependent on the political recognition of the public officials on how they will accept the rules. The effectiveness of the law shall be dependent on the political order. Essentially, the people who hold powerful positions in the government must be controlled by those who shall agree with the constitutional structure of power (Bayles, 1978). As such, law and politics have their own distinct institutional characteristics even if their own spheres are supposed to be based on basic human rights, democratic procedures, and principles and values (Post, 2010). Cerar (2010, p. 20) has defined the relationship between law and politics as social phenomena that resulted from the same entity, which is a monistic ontological point of view. The other conception which separates the existence of law and politics is based on the human dualistic or pluralistic perception of the world, which gives the law and politics their own distinct existence (Cerar, 2010). The relation between politics and law holds a dual function known as the progressive function and the safeguarding function (Cerar, 2010). When law and politics are taken separately or together, they have a tendency to promote and at the same time, suppress the development of societal relations. However, they also have the power to bring about justice and order in society. The spirit of the “separate and connected” relationship between law and politics is not necessarily for their integral existence, but rather, it will be able to map out each other’s boundaries. The borders or boundaries serve the “checks and balances” mechanism which aims to prevent the excessive one-sidedness in politics or the law (Cerar, 2010). However, in reality, all legal institutes represent a “partial reflection of individual or collective political decisions that were made in a given time and in a particular environment that had assumed a legal form and nature” (Cerar, 2010). Such statement holds true for the systems where the main rule-framer is being governed by a highly politically legitimized body (Cerar, 2010). This is also applicable to a judicial-precedent law that bears a strong influence for the reason that the most autonomous judiciary has been determined by political influence. The relationship of law and politics is deontic or normative in such a way that politics should be able to provide the normative force to law (Bayles, 1978). In order that the relationship will exist, the just political order must rest upon the consent of the majority of the people, and in effect, the political order will confer a normative force to the constitution (Bayles, 1978). Under the theory of natural law, a deontic relationship between law and politics is also implied. Thus, if political principles shall become part of natural law, they shall be deemed to have conferred legitimacy upon the legal system. Hence, if the rules are made by an illegitimate political order, they cannot be considered as valid laws. The Nazi political system violated the internal morality of law when there was failure to constitute a legal system based on the view of Professor Lon Fuller (Bayles, 1978). Thus, once the constitution has been duly established, the constitutional law has a tendency to restrict politics. This can be illustrated in the requirements enumerated in the constitution in order to make valid amendments or revisions thereto. In effect, the constitutional amending provision regulates the forms of political activities (Bayles, 1978). In the case of America, the requirement for the ratification of the amendments by a vote of three-fourths of the states has significantly affected the political activity that may result to an equal rights amendment. It shall be impractical to change the structure of representation within the U.S. Senate since it will be impossible for the state to deprive its two (2) elected senators without its consent (Bayles, 1978). Another illustration is the case of Canada where relationship of constitutional law to politics has become complicated. The Canadian Constitution is the British North America Act that has been passed last century by the British parliament. However, the Trudeau federal government is not willing to reach an agreement with the majority of provinces on the request for patriation of the constitution by amending the formula for approving a revision (Bayles, 1978). As part of recourse, the issue was submitted to the Canadian Supreme Court. On the part of the federal government, it contends that the issue is purely legal. It further contends that the Parliament is empowered to pass any regulation, and this includes a request for patriation of the constitution (Bayles, 1978). However, the majority of the dissenting provinces maintain that the issue is purely a political in nature which involves the nature of federal-provincial relations where unilateral alteration of one party is not allowed. On the part of the federal government, it contends that the decision of the court should be respected and maintains that politics depends on the law (Bayles, 1978). In the same manner, law is also responsible for conflict management between the people in relation to its social diversity aspect. In reality, law has the power to bring order within the cultural and social structure, by avoiding physical violence such as war and conflicts. This is in the exercise of police power and controlling of use or allocation of resources, in connection to its decision-making process, and establishment of values, knowledge and beliefs of the people (Turk, 2004, p. 102). Law now becomes the power which sets peace and order in society by regulating conflicts. Even though law may be referred to as the force or power that may be used as a weapon in social conflict resolutions, this power may also produce negative results such as racial inequality. Having a law on one’s side in a conflict means that one person can rightfully use or call upon others to use violence to support a person’s claims against others. The decisions made by authorities, including decisions regarding the respective claims of disputing parties may favor one party over another. In a case decided by a court, it may be prejudicial against the defendant on the basis of his or her race, using the law as a power of the court to render decisions. In this manner, politics can interpret the law as an obstacle towards the achievement of political goals (Cerar, 2010). According to Post (2010), one of the salient features of politics is that it is designed to represent social reality to be primarily agonistic in the sense that the salient features of the law are structured to represent the union of social reality. Both politics and law misrepresent the actual social reality since the present social life cannot be considered as agonistic nor essentially unified (Post, 2010). This gives the idea that disagreements or conflicts may rise between the two concepts even if the government has opted to deploy the social form of law, or has decided to engage in politics. This can be illustrated in the example of racial prejudice. The controversy about racial discrimination has existed since time immemorial and it will not simply disappear even if society has enacted a law which prohibits such discrimination or even if the courts have ordered the enforcement of such statute. Post (2010) argued that there is a high probability that the disagreement will persist due to conflicting judicial interpretations of the statute. In fact, there can be several courts that will reach different conclusions as long as there is an ongoing political disagreement about surrounding the issue on racial discrimination. One classic example is the U.S. case of Powell v. Alabama where the court ruled for the unjust imposition of the death penalty against nine (9) African-American boys who were discriminated based on their race or color. Based from the facts of the case, there were seven (7) white boys who boarded the train that was scheduled to leave for Alabama. The station master was informed that a group Negroes boys started a fight, but the white American boys were ordered to step out of the train except for one passenger. In the mean time, two white female passengers made an accusation that the passengers who were African American boys sexually abused them. The state court ruled in favor of the victims and the eight (8) African-American boys were found guilty by the courts and ordered to suffer the death penalty. On appeal before the Supreme Court, the High Court reversed the decision and ruled in favor of the defendants. It was held that the African-American boys were deprived of their right to due process and the right to be assisted by an attorney. Hence, this is a clear manifestation that the law, through the courts, may abuse its power to work injustice against the people based on race, color and ethnicity. Therefore, the power of the law may cause prejudices that may result to racial inequality. In a similar manner, the decision of the court may also be politically motivated to favor the whites against the blacks. The idea that was presented in this particular case is that the law may also be a weapon that may cause injustice since there was no fair play for the white Americans were favored than black Americans on the basis of an implicit bias resulting to racial inequality. Post (2010) argued that to be able to accurately theorize the relationship between politics and law, there should be the recognition of the agreement and disagreement brought about by social facts continue to exist, through the use of either politics or law. Politics has been referred to as a social practice that allows the assumption of disagreement, yet it is dependent upon the social fact of agreement. On the other hand, law is a social practice that presumes an agreement, yet it finds ways to tame and resolve ongoing disagreement within its own boundaries (Post, 2010). However, law as a power may also be abused and may cause chaos, rather than to serve its purpose of becoming a weapon to resolve social conflicts. Law is politics if it serves as a power that promotes the interest of fairness, equality, reasonableness, justice and recognized by the authorities of the political structure. The law must rest on society and work for the common goal that will promote the interest of the greater majority, rather than to favor the caprice of a limited few. The power of the law must not be abused as a means of social control through the use of force, threat, duress, habits and generality. The relationship of law and politics is to serve as the “checks and balances mechanism” to ensure that each one works within the prescribed limits (Cerar, 2010). Therefore, even if law is synonymous to politics, it should conform to the basic requisites of genuine morality and justice.

References:

Bayles, M. D., 1978. Law and Politics. Principles of Legislation. Detroit: Wayne State Cerar, M., 2009, “The Relationship Between Law and Politics”, Annual Survey Of International & Comparative Law, 15, 1, pp. 19-41, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 25 May 2014. Post, R. 2010, “Theorizing Disagreement: Reconceiving the Relationship Between Law and Politics”, California Law Review, 98, 4, pp. 1319-1350, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 25 May 2014. Turk, A. T, 1978. “Law as a Weapon in Social Conflict”. The Sociology of Law: A Conflict Perspective. Ed. Reasons, Charles E. and Rich, Robert M. Toronto: Butterworths. Turk, A. T., 2004. “Law as a Weapon in Social Conflict”. Social Problems, Law, and Society. Eds. Stout, Angela Kathryn, Dello Buono, Richard Alan and William J. Chambliss. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Law and Politics

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In the sociology of law written by Mathieu Deflem, chapter seven, eight, and then deal with how the law is related to economy, politics, and culture. Both laws and culture have interactions and they influenced each other in one way or the other. Some cultures get incorporated into law while some laws made influence the cultural practices of people (Deflem 199). Depending on the relation to law, cultures can be classified into western and non-western cultures. The western culture mainly gets influenced by law meaning that legal principles influence the cultural practices of the western people. The non-western culture does not have written aspect in it but the culture mainly influences some laws that govern the people practicing such cultures (Deflem 204). Due to the western basing itself on legal perspectives, the culture follows the stipulated provisions of the law while the non-western culture does not follow any stipulated regulations.

There is also an interaction between law and politics because the political organ of governance is usually influenced by the legal provisions. The laws mainly apply to government officials, corporations, and unions of trade. There are laws that govern all political activities including elections and campaigns and governments have agencies that ensure implementation of the laws (Deflem 167). Law also interacts with economics because there are economics theories that interact with the law. The interpretation of the law in an economic perspective helps to identify the laws that can be economically viable or effective. The analysis of law in economic perspective can be useful in areas such as political science and political economics. In conclusion, all cultural law, legal economics, and political law interact to provide an extensive interpretation of the law (Deflem 148). All the three areas help to analyze law according to the situation at current.

In the fifth chapter of Invitation to Law and Society, the author, Kitty Calavita addresses situations where setups have two contrasting laws that may lead to confusion on the law that applies. The author uses an example of entry rules in a gym to show how legal pluralism exists between the two sets of governments. For example, there are federal tax laws that require all citizens to file returns to the Internal Revenue Service annually and the state governments also require people to file the same returns to the governments (Calavita 78). The two laws usually provide a conflicting nature leading to double taxation on the side of the Americans. There are other laws that have been developed that have led to a direct conflict among the two sets of government such as the legalization of marijuana. Other setups of the governments also rules out some laws that have been passed citing that the laws are unconstitutional (Calavita 84). These contradicting laws bring confusion among the public and the interpreters and they may lead to general confusion.

The conflicting laws have led to many people being affected such as the disabled and also the people seeking asylum. Recently, there have been many appeals from some section of the people especially the disabled just because the people did not feel that the law was interpreted correctly. The United States Social Security Administration is usually responsible for hearing the cases and the institution usually interprets the law using specific guidelines but the dissatisfaction of the disabled people means that they see the existence of provisions of other laws that may make the law go on their side (Calavita 87). The solution is the nullification of one law or to ensure that one of the laws is to be applied officially to avoid such conflicts. Through the method, people will have a common way of direction.

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Elections are integral to democratic governance. Through the mechanism of elections, politicians are held accountable for their actions, and are compelled to introduce policies that are reflective of and responsive to public opinion. Ideally, elections serve as a ‘major source of political recruitment, a means of making government, and of transferring government power, a guarantee of representation, and a major determinant of government policy’ (Heywood, 2000: 200). These do not, however, prevent the distortion of the will of the electorate in a ‘flawed democracy’.

In the Philippines, the plurality system has been enshrined in the 1935, 1973, and 1987 constitutions. Under the 1987 constitution, all elective officials – president, vice-president, senators, members of the House of Representatives, local chief executives and local legislators – are chosen by a direct vote of the people through a ‘first-past-the-post system’ (Agra, 1997b: 1).The Philippine electoral system has generally been consistent throughout history. 1 The Philippine experience with electoral politics is instructive in the process of democratic development in the Asia-Pacific region. Nearly a century since American colonial authorities introduced electoral and party politics, the quality of democratic representation as an outcome of elections has always been held in doubt. Clientelism, nepotism, fraud and violence, among others, have reinforced the elitist nature of Philippine electoral politics.

This was exacerbated during the period of Marcos’ authoritarian rule as democratic elections were briefly replaced by ‘demonstration elections’ held under duress. The ouster of the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986 has ushered in a period of redemocratization. Nonetheless, the election and subsequent removal of President Joseph Estrada in January 2001 remains a constant reminder of the continuing ‘defects’ of Philippine democracy.This chapter will investigate the relationship between elections and democratic development in the Philippines. It will trace the emergence and 1.However, the mode of electing members of the legislature in its several historical incarnations has had some variations in terms of constituency (from single to medium to large) and voting (write-in single to multiple to block voting).

The 1987 constitution also introduced a party-list system for electing 20 per cent of the lower house.Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia institutionalization of electoral politics at various junctures in Philippine history. Essentially, it will determine the degree of proportionality in which votes are translated into political mandates. Lastly, it will explore the modalities of reforming the electoral system in order to enrich the democratization process.Historical Development Elections and other democratic institutions were primarily imported into the Philippines from Western models. The emergence of institutions such as constitutional law, the secret ballot, the referendum, political parties and legislature in the Philippines was a product of American colonialism.

Hence, colonialism became the defining force in the emergence of democracy in the Philippine nation-state. The Philippines as a conquest colony underwent political development predicated on the interest, influence and power of the colonial authorities (Paredes, 1989: 2-4).After establishing total control of the Philippines by 1901, the American colonizers governed their newly acquired territory through the appointive Philippine Commission under the supervision of the United States governor general. The commission performed both executive and legislative functions, with token Filipino participation, until 1907. Soon after, the Americans introduced elections to allow greater participation of the Filipino elite in colonial governance (Caoli, 1989; McCoy, 1994; Franco, 2000).

Taking a cue from the elite experience at limited municipal elections during the last days of Spanish colonial rule, the American colonial government proceeded to lay down the foundation for municipal, provincial and national elections (Paredes, 1989). Initially, the Americans conducted municipal elections in areas pacified under military rule. The first election in the country was held in Baliwag, Bulacan on May 1898 under American supervision. This was followed by four Cavite municipalities, in compliance with General Order No.

40, Series of 1900, issued by the military governor, for establishing municipalities in the Philippine Islands. The military government first granted wide rights of suffrage but later limited the franchise (Maambong, 1992; Hutchcroft, 2000).Upon the establishment of civilian government in 1901, the Philippine Commission passed Act No. 60 to serve as the organic law for all municipal governments in the country.The Act required voters to be:1. Male, aged 23 and above; 2.

A resident of the municipality where they were to vote for a period of six months immediately preceding the elections; and 3. Any of the following three classes: individuals who speak, read and write English/Spanish, own real property worth at least P500, or have held local.Philippines: Julio Teehankee government positions prior to the occupation of the country in 1898 (Tancangco, 1988: 81). These provisions effectively restricted participation in the early electoral exercise to the educated and landowning members of the traditional elite. As a result, factional rivalries and personality issues among the local influential families marked these elections (Caoli, 1989).Nonetheless, the Philippine Commission continued to place the legal framework for a more systematic organization of local governments.

It enacted Acts No. 82 and No. 83, providing for the organization of municipal and provincial local governments. A limited electorate was given the right to elect the municipal president (mayor), vice-president and the council. Provinces were governed by a three-member board, headed by a governor who was indirectly elected by the municipal councillors in the province.

Thus, the provincial elections of 1902, 1904 and 1906 were reflections of municipal politics (De Guzman, Reforma and Panganiban, 1988; Franco, 2000; Hutchcroft, 2000). Consequently, ‘from local elections in 1901, to legislative elections in 1907, and presidential elections in 1935, the Americans built electoral politics from the municipality upwards, thereby entrenching provincial families in both local and national offices’ (McCoy, 1994: 12).Colonial Elections The first legislative election was held on 30 July 1907 and was administered under the first General Election Law of the Philippines (Act No. 1532), enacted on 9 January 1907.

It provided for the election of members of the unicameral Philippine Assembly, elective provincial officials, and all municipal officials, by direct vote of qualified electors. The law created a Board of Election Inspectors to direct, administer and supervise elections in the polling places to prevent fraud. A system characterized by strict secrecy in balloting was also adopted (Tancangco, 1988: 82).The total number of registered voters was 104,966 or only 1.15 per cent of the total population at that time. From this number, a turnout of 98,251 went to the polls and cast their ballots (Liang, 1970: 67).

Philippine party politics, at that period, was characterized by clientelist interactions between the Filipino politicians and their American colonial patrons. Characteristic of most colonial regimes, the Americans implemented a system of indirect administration utilizing dependable native clients. The measure of success for an American colonial official was their ability to cultivate and manipulate effective local clients in implementing American policies. Thus, electoral campaigns were neither venues for the discussion of social issues nor mass appeals for voters, but negotiations between national political personalities and the provincial landowning elites (Grossholtz, 1964; Tancangco, 1988; Paredes, 1989).Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia There were two major parties – the Partido Nacionalista and the Partido Nacional Progresista. The Nacionalista Party (NP) was formed on 12 March 1907 as a merger of several nationalist movements and organizations pushing for Philippine independence.

The Progresista Party was formerly the Partido Federalista – the country’s first political party organized in 1900 by a group of prominent, mostly Manila-based ilustrados2 to push for the annexation to and statehood within the United States (Liang, 1970; Tancangco, 1988; Lande, 1996). The Federalistas were the original recipients of American colonial patronage who initially gravitated around the clientelist ties between Governor General William Howard Taft and party founder Commissioner T.H. Pardo de Tavera.

However, this support shifted to the younger, provincially based political leaders of the Nacionalistas – Sergio Osmeña and Manuel Quezon – despite their nationalist posturing. Ironically, the Partido Progresista would later merge with a nationalist party to form the Partido Democrata in 1917 (Liang, 1970).

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A Principled Supreme Court, Unnerved by Trump

By William Baude

Mr. Baude is a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School.

At the end of another momentous term, the Supreme Court has issued major rulings that will reshape the law. Like much that the court does today, these decisions, in areas like administrative law, have been widely criticized as corrupt or illegitimate.

For the most part, this criticism does not give the Supreme Court enough credit. In case after case, it has rightly emphasized the importance of turning to historical understandings in deciding constitutional cases rather than imposing modern policy views. Most of the court’s decisions are principled and sound — most but unfortunately not all.

There were two particularly salient blemishes on the court’s performance this year — and they are particularly unfortunate because they related to Donald Trump.

Still, for most of the term, the court based its decisions on historical understandings. Perhaps most significant, it has imposed important limitations on the administrative state, sharply limiting the ability of agencies to impose regulatory fines without a jury and holding that courts, rather than agencies, will be in charge of deciding whether ambiguous laws forbid new agency initiatives. The court has also increased the power of cities to displace unhoused people from public spaces, curtailing an activist string of rulings from the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In these cases, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented orally from the bench. Yet the same logic has led to some victories for the Biden administration, too.

The court rejected an important challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s appropriations structure in an originalist opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, with an emphatic concurrence about the importance of history joined by the cross-ideological group of Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The court upheld a federal gun control statute dealing with domestic violence by an 8-to-1 vote, with many justices thoughtfully discussing the role of history in shaping these cases.

In other high-profile cases, the court has insisted on enforcing the Constitution’s limits on judicial power, rejecting challenges brought by conservative activists because they lacked standing to bring those challenges into federal court. In doing so, the court showed that the doctrine of standing, which has often been used to curb lawsuits by environmentalists and consumer protection groups, can also be used to block right-wing lawsuits and is not just a shield for one cause or ideology.

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Current Issue

The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially

Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight-year crime spree and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable.

United States Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait on October 7, 2022, in Washington, DC.

Welp, Donald Trump won. The Supreme Court today ruled that presidents are entitled to “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts, then contended that pressuring the vice president and the Department of Justice to overthrow the government was an “official act,” then said that talking to advisers or making public statements are “official acts” as well, and then determined that evidence of what presidents say and do cannot be used against them to establish that their acts are “unofficial.”

The ruling from the Supreme Court was 6-3, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, on a straight party-line vote, with all the Republican-appointed justices joining to give the president the power of a king. While some parts of the federal indictment against Trump will be remanded back down to the district-court trial judge to determine whether any of Trump’s actions were “unofficial” (“unofficial” acts, the court says, are not entitled to immunity), Trump’s victory in front of the Supreme Court is total. Essentially, all he has to do is claim that everything he did to plot a coup was part of his “official” duties, and the Supreme Court provided no clear method or evidentiary standard that can be used to challenge that presumption.

Legally, there are two critical things to understand about the totality of the court’s ruling here:

• The immunity is absolute
• There is no legislative way to get rid of what the court has given

On the first point, the immunity granted to Trump in this case far exceeds the immunity granted to, say, police officers or other government officials, when they act in their official capacities. Those officials are granted “qualified” immunity from civil penalties. Because the immunity is “qualified,” it can be taken away (“pierced” is the legal jargon for taking away an official’s qualified immunity). People can bring evidence against officials and argue that they shouldn’t be given immunity because of the gravity or depravity of their acts.

Not so with Trump. Presidents are now entitled to “absolute” immunity, which means that no matter what they do, the immunity cannot be lost. They are always and forever immune, no matter what evidence is brought to bear.

Moreover, unlike other officials, presidents are now entitled to absolute immunity from criminal charges. Even a cop can be charged with, say, murder , even if they argue that killing people is part of their jobs. But not presidents. Presidents can murder, rape, steal, and pretty much do whatever they want, so long as they argue that murdering, raping, or stealing is part of the official job of the president of the United States. There is no crime that pierces the veil of absolute immunity.

And there is essentially nothing we can do to change it. The courts created qualified immunity for public officials, but it can be undone by state or federal legislatures if they pass a law removing that protection. Not so with absolute presidential immunity. The court here says that absolute immunity is required by the separation of powers inherent in the Constitution, meaning that Congress cannot take it away. Congress, according to the Supreme Court, does not have the power to pass legislation saying “the president can be prosecuted for crimes.” Impeachment, and only impeachment, is the only way to punish presidents, and, somewhat obviously, impeachment does nothing to a president who is already no longer in office.

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Under this new standard, a president can go on a four-to-eight-year crime spree, steal all the money and murder all the people they can get their hands on, all under guise of presumptive “official” behavior, and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable for their crimes while in office. That, according to the court, is what the Constitution requires. 

There will be Republicans and legal academics and whatever the hell job Jonathan Turley has who will go into overdrive arguing that the decision isn’t as bad as all that. These bad-faith actors will be quoted or even published in The Washington Post and The New York Times . They will argue that presidents can still be prosecuted for “unofficial acts,” and so they will say that everything is fine.

But they will be wrong, because while the Supreme Court says “unofficial” acts are still prosecutable, the court has left nearly no sphere in which the president can be said to be acting “unofficially.” And more importantly, the court has left virtually no vector of evidence that can be deployed against a president to prove that their acts were “unofficial.” If trying to overthrow the government is “official,” then what isn’t? And if we can’t use the evidence of what the president says or does, because communications with their advisers, other government officials, and the public is “official,” then how can we ever show that an act was taken “unofficially”?

Take the now-classic example of a president ordering Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival. According to the logic of the Republicans on the Supreme Court, that would likely be an official act. According to their logic, there is also no way to prove it’s “unofficial,” because any conversation the president has with their military advisers (where, for instance, the president tells them why they want a particular person assassinated) is official and cannot be used against them.

There will doubtless be people still wondering if Trump can somehow be prosecuted: The answer is “no.” Special counsel Jack Smith will surely argue that presenting fake electors in connection with his cadre of campaign sycophants was not an “official act.” Lower-court judges may well agree. But when that appeal gets back to the Supreme Court next year, the same justices who just ruled that Trump is entitled to absolute immunity will surely rule that submitting fake electors was also part of Trump’s “official” responsibilities.

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There is no way to change that outcome in the short term. In the long term, the only way to undo the authoritarianism the court has just ushered in is to expand the Supreme Court . Democrats would have to win the upcoming presidential election and the House and the Senate. Then Congress would have to pass a law expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court; then the Senate would have to pass that law as well, which, at a minimum, would likely have to include getting rid of the filibuster. Then the president would have to sign such a bill, and appoint additional Supreme Court justices who do not think that presidents should be kings—and then those justices would have to be confirmed. And all of that would have to happen before the current Supreme Court hears whatever Trump appeal from his January 6 charges comes up next, because if court expansion happens after the current Supreme Court dismisses the charges against him, double jeopardy will attach and Trump can never be prosecuted again under a less-fascist court.

So, since that’s not going to happen, Trump won. He won completely. He tried to overthrow the government, and he got away with it. I cannot even imagine what he’ll try if he is actually given power again, knowing full well that he will never be held accountable for literal crimes.

If you ever wondered what you’d have done in ancient Rome, when the Roman Republic was shuttered and Augustus Caesar declared himself the “first” citizen of Rome, the answer is: whatever you’re doing right now. It’s what you would have done during the Restoration of King Charles II in England, and what you would have done when Napoleon declared himself emperor of France. This, right here, is how republics die.

And the answer that cries out from the abyss of history is that most people, in real time, don’t care. Republics fall because most citizens are willing to give it away. Most people think that it won’t be that bad to lose the rule of law, and the people who stand to benefit from the ending of republican self-government tell everybody that it will be OK. When the Imperium came to be, the Romans didn’t realize that they were seeing the last form of European self-government for 2,000 years, and the ones who did were largely happy about it.

For my part, I assume that like Mark Antony’s wife, Fulvia, defiling the decapitated head of Cicero, Martha-Ann Alito will be jabbing her golden hairpin into my tongue for criticizing the powerful soon enough. But I’m just a writer. I wonder what the rest of you will do as the last vestiges of democracy are taken away by the Imperial Supreme Court and the untouchable executive officer they’ve just created.

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Throughout this critical election year and a time of media austerity and renewed campus activism and rising labor organizing, independent journalism that gets to the heart of the matter is more critical than ever before. Donate right now and help us hold the powerful accountable, shine a light on issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and build a more just and equitable future.

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Elie Mystal is  The Nation ’s justice correspondent and the host of its legal podcast, Contempt of Court . He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, published by The New Press. Elie can be followed @ElieNYC .

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The Assassination Hypothetical Isn’t Even the Scariest Part of the Supreme Court Immunity Ruling

The Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity is a catastrophe for American constitutional order.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion holds—for the first time in U.S. history—that presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution that ordinary citizens do not. Roberts then divides presidential conduct into three, wholly new classes: exercises of “core constitutional powers,” “official act[s],” and “unofficial acts.” Exercises of “core” presidential powers garner “absolute immunity” from prosecution. “Official acts” are “presumptively” immune. “Unofficial acts” enjoy no immunity.

No part of this structure is grounded in the text or original understanding of the Constitution. Roberts testily dismisses as unconvincing the powerful textual and founding-era evidence in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent (laid out in even greater detail in this amicus brief , of which I am a signatory). But tellingly, he and the other five avowed originalists who signed on to the majority opinion don’t even try to construct an originalist rationale of their own.

When originalists simply ignore everything done, said, and understood by those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, you know you are reading an exercise in power, not principle.

But even exercises in unprincipled judicial power sometimes produce sensible results. This one does not.

Analysis of the first portion of the court’s immunity structure—exercises of “core” presidential powers now made absolutely immune from prosecution—illustrates the bankruptcy of the whole.

The court offers no definition of core presidential powers . The idea seems to be that core powers are those the Constitution grants exclusively to the president and over which Congress and the courts exercise no authority at all. Given the tiny number of powers expressly granted by Article 2 to the president alone—the pardon power, the commander-in-chief power, the power to nominate (though not to confirm) judges and certain federal officials, and one or two others—this category should be so small as to be inconsequential. But, undaunted by its originalist commitments, the majority blithely adds several others, notably the power to dismiss presidential appointees and the power of prosecutorial discretion to investigate and prosecute crime, and leaves the door open for further expansion.

Consider the court’s discussion of three of the powers it deems core—pardoning, removal of executive officials, and prosecutorial discretion.

Roberts treats the award of pardons as the paradigm of a core presidential power for which presidents have absolute immunity.

But his understanding of the pardon power is just wrong. It is true that presidents can grant pardons to whomever they wish. And, as I have argued elsewhere , presidential pardons once issued cannot be voided or modified by Congress or the courts. In other words, as to the person pardoned , the exercise of the president’s power is irrevocable and absolute. But that the president has the power to issue nonvoidable pardons does not in the slightest imply that he can issue them for any reason whatever with no consequence to himself .

To hold otherwise is to say that presidents can openly offer pardons as quid pro quo exchanges for monetary bribes, political contributions, tenders of business concessions for themselves, or offers of employment to friends and relatives. For centuries, the British crown filled royal coffers by openly selling pardons . Roberts’ opinion offers no barrier to a return to those glorious days of yore.

Likewise, his opinion necessarily implies that presidents can use pardons to protect themselves from criminal liability (even in the limited class of cases the court has left open for prosecution), impeachment, or any other unpleasantness.

In 1974 the House Judiciary Committee approved an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon for obstruction of justice, based in part on Nixon’s “dangling” offers of pardon to his Watergate co-conspirators in order to persuade them not to talk. At the time, few apart from Nixon’s most die-hard defenders would seriously have suggested that this conduct was not both impeachable and indictable. Indeed, the consensus on the issue was surely one of the reasons Gerald Ford felt it necessary to pardon Nixon.

Much has been made of the fact that, under Roberts’ opinion, a president who ordered the military to assassinate a political rival would enjoy at least presumptive immunity for their official acts. But this lurid hypothetical, though an accurate description of Roberts’ new rule, can too easily be dismissed as paranoid hyperventilation. Far more troubling is that Roberts’ construct of presumptive presidential immunity for all official acts plus absolute presidential immunity for any pardon grant opens the door to a regime of impunity for presidentially sanctioned crime and oppression by the entire executive branch.

Following an offer from the president’s son of a lucrative private-sector job, the head of the National Park Service illegally grants the president’s family and favored political supporters control of all lodging and concessions in the parks. Son and NPS head—pardoned.

In response to pressure from the chair of the president’s national political party, the head of the Bureau of Land Management adopts a policy that only companies headed by presidential donors will receive oil leases on federal land. Party chair and BLM chief—pardoned.

Border Patrol officers, at the president’s direction, set up mass open-air detention camps for undocumented immigrants in which the inhabitants are provided insufficient food and only tarps for shelter, are given no medical care and no access to courts to contest the legality of their detention, and are beaten senseless if they protest. Pardoned.

National Guardsmen, ordered by the president to peaceful demonstrations against administration policies and told to “rough ’em up,” maim, and kill protesters. Pardoned.

In every such case, the president who ordered, sanctioned, or benefited from the crime would enjoy at least presumptive immunity under the court’s new rules for any official acts taken in conjunction with the criminal act. His family, political allies, and criminal subordinates would receive the complete immunity afforded by a pardon. And the president would have absolute immunity for pardoning his relatives and minions. Impunity from the law is the defining feature of autocracies and kleptocracies around the world. The Supreme Court just welcomed impunity to America.

Even worse than the court’s treatment of pardons is its holding that the president’s authority to remove subordinate officials and control over the Justice Department’s exercise of discretion to investigate or prosecute crime are core powers enjoying absolute immunity.

In the present case, the court applies this ruling to excise from Jack Smith’s indictment allegations that Trump asked the DOJ to pursue sham investigations into supposed election fraud in order to persuade states not to certify Joe Biden’s win and threatened to dismiss the acting attorney general if he did not go along with it.

This result is bad enough, but the implications of the court’s new rule are terrifying. A president now enjoys “absolute immunity” if he orders the Justice Department to undertake a program of factually meritless investigations and prosecutions of his political enemies, even if he expressly avows that the purpose is retribution for past political opposition and a desire to hamstring his party’s opponents for the future . (Remember: DOJ officials who follow the president’s illegal orders can, under the court’s new rule, be pardoned at no legal risk to the president.)

One can imagine the court’s defenders responding to these hypotheticals by protesting that obviously corrupt and dictatorial exercises of even core powers would surely be prosecutable under appropriately drawn statutes. But in that case, the immunity conferred by Roberts’ taxonomy would not be absolute at all. And he gives no indication that immunity for exercises of “core” powers is in any sense conditional.

Moreover, elsewhere in Roberts’ opinion, he writes that courts trying to determine the immunity category into which presidential conduct falls (core powers, official acts, unofficial acts) may not consider the president’s motives. This is complete madness. In any case of criminal misuse of official power, the distinction between criminal and noncriminal behavior almost invariably rests on why the defendant took official action. A judge who dismisses a criminal case on the ostensible ground of insufficient evidence is merely exercising a core power of the judiciary. But if the evidence shows that the judge did so because they were offered a bribe, their motive renders the act criminal.

If courts may not consider presidential motive in deciding whether an exercise of presidential power is criminal, then the Supreme Court’s supposed distinction between absolute immunity for core powers and presumptive immunity for other official conduct is entirely illusory because the evidence necessary to rebut the presumption becomes inadmissible.

The Framers of the American Constitution understood that a corrupt or demagogic president could wreck the system they were creating. Accordingly, they erected barriers against that eventuality. They gave Congress multiple means of checking presidential authority through legislation. They created impeachment to remove truly bad presidents from office and bar them from returning. And they unmistakably believed that presidents who employed their powers to usurp the constitutional order through criminal conduct could be deterred by the prospect of prosecution in the courts.

For decades, Congress has progressively abdicated its responsibility for checking presidential excess by legislation. In the current moment, the MAGA cult that dominates the congressional Republican Party has raised slavish acceptance of whatever their once and perhaps future president demands to an absolute imperative. In Trump’s previous term, Congress demonstrated that party loyalty has rendered impeachment a nullity. By effectively exempting presidents from any realistic threat of prosecution for criminal abuses of their powers, the Supreme Court has now removed the final obstacle to presidential dictatorship.

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17 The Politics of the Rule of Law

• Published: August 1995
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This chapter examines the political significance of the moral justification of the rule of law in Britain. It regards the rule of law not as a universal moral imperative, but rather as a doctrine which is valid or good to certain types of society provided they meet the cultural and institutional presuppositions for the rule of law. It notes two contemporary approaches to the justification of the rule of law. The first regards it as requirement to the justification of the rule of law. The second is the tradition-oriented approach. It emphasizes two virtues: bureaucratic justice, the protection of the individual in anonymous social surroundings; and democratic continuity. It also argues that these virtues can only be achieved in a country with democratic culture, and a culture of legality with a tradition of independence for the courts, the legal profession, the police, and the civil service.

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Judge acquits 28 people accused in Panama Papers case, including law firm co-founder

FILE - Juergen Mossack, partner of the law firm Mossack-Fonseca, leaves the Supreme Court during the trial of the “Panama Papers” money laundering case in Panama City, April 8, 2024. On Friday, a Panamanian judge acquitted Mossack and 27 other people who were accused of money laundering in the notorious Panama Papers case. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera, File)

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PANAMA CITY (AP) — A judge has acquitted 28 people accused of money laundering in an international case known as the Panama Papers, including the co-founder of a law firm that authorities say was at the center of a conspiracy to hide money linked to illegal activities.

Jürgen Mossack founded Mossack & Fonseca with then associate Ramón Fonseca, who died in May. Mossack was acquitted on Friday along with others after a Panamanian judge found that the evidence against Mossack didn’t comply with the chain of custody after authorities raided the office of the now defunct firm.

Prosecutors had accused Mossack, Fonseca and others of creating offshore companies and using complex transactions to hide money from illegal activities related to the so-called car wash corruption scandal involving Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, which pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to a charge related to using shell companies to hide millions of dollars in bribes paid worldwide to win public contracts.

The judge noted that other evidence in the Panama Papers case “was not sufficient and conclusive to determine the criminal responsibility of the accused.”

In addition, the judge lifted personal and property precautionary measures against all the defendants, according to a judicial statement.

“We feel satisfied in the midst of mixed emotions, because many lives were affected along the way,” Guillermina Mc Donald, who was the defense attorney for Mossack and Fonseca, told The Associated Press. Her firm also represented 80% of the accused firm’s collaborators.

Judge Balaoisa Marquínez had decided to combine the Panama Papers case with another known as “Operation Car Wash,” a major anti-corruption investigation that began in Brazil.

On Friday, she ruled that in the car wash case, “it was not possible to determine the entry of money from illicit sources, coming from Brazil, into the Panamanian financial system with the purpose of hiding, concealing, disguising or helping to evade the legal consequences of the preceding crime.”

In June 2022, Mossack, Fonseca and 37 other people were acquitted in a separate money laundering case.

The investigation in Brazil began in 2014, with the Mossack & Fonseca firm later coming under scrutiny after 11 million financial documents tied to the company were leaked.

The repercussions of the leak were widespread: it led to the resignation of a prime minister in Iceland and brought scrutiny to now former leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, Chinese politicians and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.

The intriguing real-life story of Keir Starmer, U.K.’s new prime minister

As the next leader of Britain, Keir Starmer brings working-class roots, a forensic legal style and a ruthless approach to politics.

Key takeaways

Summary is AI-generated, newsroom-reviewed.

• Working-class roots, forensic legal style, ruthless approach to politics.
• Starmer, 61, is private, not flashy, hard to pin down.
• Served as country’s top prosecutor; anti-monarchist who was then knighted.

Did our AI help? Share your thoughts.

LONDON — He was a lefty lawyer who defended vegan anarchists before prosecuting terrorists on behalf of the British crown. He was an editor of a Trotsky magazine in his youth, yet he delighted capitalists by putting “wealth creation” at the heart of the Labour Party platform this year. He was an anti-monarchist who was then knighted as “Sir Keir” and now will meet with the king once a week.

It all makes for a complex, messy, real-life story. It also makes it tricky to anticipate what sort of prime minister Keir Starmer will be.

One of his biographers confessed that Starmer is “hard to pin down” — and he had total access to his subject.

Starmer, 61, has used that ambiguity to his advantage. People have been able to project onto him what they want to believe. For a long time, he even benefited from the rumor that he was the inspiration for the Mark Darcy/Colin Firth urbane-human-rights-lawyer character in the “Bridget Jones” books and movies. (He was not.)

Being many things to many people may have helped Starmer deliver a big win on Thursday. His center-left, social democratic Labour Party is returning to power after 14 years in the wilderness, while voters have banished the Conservatives to the opposition.

But what is Starmer’s mandate, really, other than his self-evident campaign slogan of “Change”? In Ipsos polling last month, half of respondents said they didn’t know what he stood for .

Starmer didn’t give foreign press interviews during this election. That’s typical for party leaders. But close colleagues also call him a “very private man.” He has a wife, Victoria, and two teenage children, whose names he has never made public, and a cat, whose name he was willing to reveal as Jojo . He has expressed worry about the impact a move to Downing Street will have on his family.

He’s not a flash politician. As an orator, he’s no Winston Churchill. But his friends say he can be ruthless, which might be what a stumbling-along Britain needs.

2024 U.K. election

“He is very, very driven, quite relentless,” said Tom Baldwin, a journalist and former Labour spin-doctor, who recently published a well-received biography of Starmer. “He has an oversized view of his capacity to bring change. He is not going to inspire people with big speeches. What he might do is fix things.”

Starmer’s working-class roots

Starmer will be the most working-class leader of Britain in a generation — coming in after a prime minister who by some counts was richer than the royals .

On the campaign trail, Starmer introduced himself by saying, “My mum was a nurse, my dad was a toolmaker.” He talked about growing up with unpaid bills and the phone being cut off. Pasta “was a foreign food” in his home, his biographer Baldwin wrote. The family did not travel abroad.

Starmer scored well on tests and gained entry into an elite high school. He was the first of his line to attend a university — Leeds, and then a year at Oxford.

He has said he wants to help young families get their first mortgage, knowing that his parents’ modest semidetached stucco home “was everything to my family — it gave us stability, and I believe every family deserves the same.”

He cites his mother’s work as a nurse, and the care she received for a debilitating inflammatory syndrome, for instilling his reverence for Britain’s National Health Service. His wife works for the NHS, too, in occupational health, which Starmer says has given him “insight” into the struggles of the underfunded, backlogged system.

Starmer says that his father felt “ very disrespected ” for working at a factory, that he was emotionally distant. As a dad himself, Starmer says he tries to “carve out really protected time for the kids.” He tries to stop work on Fridays at 6 p.m. Although an atheist himself, he has said they often do Shabbat dinner in keeping with his wife’s Jewish heritage.

Starmer as a lawyer

Colleagues who knew Starmer before his entry into politics say clues to how he will govern can be found in his extended life chapter as an attorney.

They say he was never a “jury’s lawyer” — the cinematic advocate who makes an impassioned closing argument — but a “judge’s lawyer,” who built the case with precedent, law, facts. Indeed, when he represented the opposition during the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, the Starmer style was often described as “ forensic .” His cross-examination managed to deflate even the bombast of Boris Johnson.

Early in his career, Starmer joined Doughty Street Chambers, known for taking on big, controversial human rights cases. He fought the death penalty in Commonwealth countries — defending, as the tabloids put it, “ baby killers and axe murderers .” He was part of a legal team that got Uganda’s Constitutional Court to invalidate the sentences of all 417 people on death row .

Starmer also worked pro bono for a pair of vegan anarchists who passed out leaflets accusing McDonald’s of low wages, cruelty to animals and support of deforestation. The burger maker sued for libel, and the case and its many appeals lasted a decade, one of the longest legal fights in British history. It ended in a kind of draw.

London media lawyer Mark Stephens, who worked on cases with Starmer, said he was “always looking 10 miles down the road,” at how a seemingly unwinnable case could be won on appeal to the Supreme Court or the European Court of Human Rights.

Starmer surprised — and upset — some of his legal colleagues when he became the country’s top prosecutor.

He oversaw the first British prosecution of al-Qaeda terrorists. He brought forward charges against Tory and Labour politicians caught up in an explosive expenses scandal, first revealed by the press. He and his prosecutors were accused of heavy-handed bias when they came down hard in arrests and charges for people who rioted in London after a black man named Mark Duggan was shot dead by police in 2011.

His knighthood came in 2014, in recognition of his work for the Crown Prosecution Service.

In Baldwin’s biography, a former partner of Starmer’s, Phillippa Kaufmann, says that “law was never going to be enough for him.”

Starmer as a politician

Starmer didn’t get into electoral politics until he was 52. That was just nine years ago, in a country where many members of Parliament began plotting their rise to power in university days.

He was elected to represent the London district of Holborn and St. Pancras in 2015 and served as a “shadow minister” in the opposition, given the thankless job of negotiating Labour’s shaky position on Brexit. Starmer was against leaving the European Union, but many blue-collar Labour voters were for it. The party’s inscrutable compromise was that it was neither for Brexit nor against it , but wanted a second referendum. This mush — and Starmer, too — probably contributed to Labour’s colossal loss to the Conservatives in 2019.

But after that election, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was out, and Starmer was in. He set out to remake the Labour Party.

Critics who were bested by Starmer in intraparty brawls call him an opportunist. His allies credit him with purging members who had contributed to the public sense that Labour had “ an antisemitism problem .” Starmer also tracked to the center to make the party electable once again.

“What Keir has done is taken all the left out of the Labour Party,” billionaire businessman John Caudwell, previously a big Tory donor, told the BBC. “He’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles and ways of growing Britain in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.”

The Labour Party highlighted his endorsement.

Starmer as prime minister

Starmer’s supporters dare hope that he will be a transformative leader — a kind of 2024 version of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, without the baggage of the Iraq War — if he is not undone by the deep divisions in his own party.

“I think he’s proved he’s quite ruthless in terms of changing his party,” said Tony Travers, a politics expert at the London School of Economics. But will that ruthlessness carry forward into government? “We’ll have to wait and see,” Travers said.

What does Starmer believe in? “He believes in pragmatism, in developing policy by solving problems, not through grand theory. And he doesn’t come to the table with ideological presuppositions,” said Josh Simons, who ran the centrist think tank Labour Together.

Starmer has his critics in the party — for the very same reason.

“I think he actually stands for very little,” said James Schneider, former director of strategic communications for Labour and a Corbyn ally.

“He seems to reflect the ideas of the people that are around him,” Schneider said. “He has shifted or been shifted more and more into the establishment position,” and his government will be an attempt to restore the establishment’s authority, not challenge it.

“He seems like a middle manager scolding his workers, or an unpopular stepdad who’s lost control of the kids,” Schneider said.

Critics on the left suspect Starmer will not be bold, but will hew to a soft middle.

Much of his focus will be on domestic politics — trying to shore up the British economy and address people’s sense that everyday costs have become unmanageable. He wants to cut soaring electricity costs — with a new state-run green utility company. He wants to cut wait times for medical and dental appointments .

Britain’s foreign policy hardly ever changes under a new government, and Travers said foreign policy would remain “amazingly unaltered” by a shift from Conservative to Labour rule. Starmer has said Britain will remain a strong member of NATO; will back Ukraine in its war against Russia; and will support Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas , while calling for a cease-fire.

Although Brexit is seen as a flop, and there is no enthusiasm for another referendum, Britain under Starmer will probably seek a closer relationship with the European Union.

Critics have described Starmer as dull. He is not. What will be most interesting — to Britain and the world — is what he does now that he and his party have power.

MONEY LAUNDERING

Panama papers trial concludes with all defendants acquitted of money laundering.

The founder of the now-shuttered law firm Mossack Fonseca was among those cleared in the long-awaited ruling that took more than two months to come down.

Panama’s courts closed out the high-profile Panama Papers trial Friday, with judge Baloisa Marquínez acquitting  all 28 people who faced trial over their alleged role in setting up shell companies used in bribery and corruption scandals in Brazil and Germany.

That included Jurgen Mossack, one of the founders of the now-shuttered law firm Mossack Fonseca that featured prominently in the Panama Papers investigation . The other founder, Ramon Fonseca, died in May before the trial concluded, resulting in the dismissal of the legal action against him.

The 85-hour-long trial took place in April, almost exactly eight years after the Panama Papers investigation was first published, and included a cast of three prosecutors and 18 defense lawyers. The judge heard from 27 witnesses and saw the presentation of more than 50 pieces of evidence, La Prensa reported.

While Marquínez originally had a term of 30 working days to issue a ruling, the Panamanian judicial code allowed her an extra day for every hundred pages on file. A representative of the court told ICIJ more than 300,000 pages were filed — which, in theory, meant the judgment could have taken as much as 23 years, per Panamanian law.

The prosecution had requested the maximum sentence for Jurgen Mossack, the now-deceased Ramón Fonseca Mora, Dick Brauer, Axel Gauster and Hans Joachin Kohlsdorf, as perpetrators of money laundering, La Prensa reported. Fifteen others were charged as primary accomplices and five as secondary accomplices. The prosecution requested an acquittal for three others: Reyna Chong, Itzel Fuentes and Zacgary Lundgren, La Prensa reported.

• Recommended reading

Panama Papers law firm co-founder ​​Ramón Fonseca Mora dies in hospital

May 09, 2024.

Latin America

When latin america’s elite wanted to hide their wealth, they turned to this panama firm, oct 03, 2021.

How the Panama Papers rocked pop culture

Apr 03, 2023.

The Panama Papers investigation remains one of the largest cross-border journalistic collaborations in history and has become shorthand for financial chicanery and political corruption in the public imagination.

Based on a trove of 11.5 million files leaked to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with ICIJ, the investigation exposed the offshore financial secrets of world leaders and other powerful public figures, triggering protests, government probes and the resignation of Iceland’s prime minister.

In 2022, both Mossack Fonseca founders — Ramón Fonseca Mora and Jürgen Mossack — were acquitted in a separate Panamanian money laundering case. Both repeatedly denied any involvement in illegal activities.

“While the court did not hold these defendants accountable, the enduring impact of our investigation persists,” Gerard Ryle, ICIJ’s executive director said in a statement. “By revealing hidden truths, as we did in the Panama Papers, we empower the public with information they need to demand accountability and push for reforms.”

• Contact ICIJ

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