SCOTUS Review by Keith Whittington
Charter Member Keith Whittington of Yale Law School published a new Supreme Court review, writing:
It is probably not a good sign for the health of the republic that in my lifetime we have developed a body of law regarding presidential immunity from legal proceedings. For most of the nation’s history, such doctrines were apparently unnecessary. Presidents might have faced many problems, but the possibility of being dragged into court was not one of them.
But times change. Presidents and former Presidents now face prosecutors and process servers, and thus we have had to contemplate the circumstances in which such individuals are amenable to judicial accountability for their alleged actions […]
Do we expect our future Presidents to be petty or not-so-petty criminals, or do we expect our future prosecutors to be partisan zealots? We can hope that neither will be true, but we might have to prepare for the possibility that one or both might be true.