Adam Schiff, the House manager leading the impeachment case against President Trump, did an excellent job of presenting a fundamentally flawed and fallacious argument in his opening statement yesterday. Schiff is a former federal prosecutor who was articulate and seemingly…
I learned one of my most valuable lessons as a lawyer early on: the side with the best lawyers doesn’t always win. I was with a small firm in D.C. only three years out of law school, and we were…
Both of the articles of impeachment passed by the Democrats in the House are unprecedented in that they charge “thought crimes” against a president. They are based on the dubious legal theory that doing something that is legal in and…
Historiography, the study of history and how to write it, hasn’t changed much in the 25 centuries since Herodotus. Herodotus conceived of history as the stories of great leaders and their victories and defeats, a conception that still dominates the…
Whatever its legal merit or lack thereof, the upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate is a political show trial that is intended to affect the upcoming presidential election for sure. So let’s consider the political implications, not the legal merits….
Our country could survive an impeachment trial of Donald Trump. We’d be wounded and I hope that calamity can be avoided, but we’d survive. The more momentous issue in the current impeachment kerfuffle is how and to what extent the…
Just how stupid are we human beings as a species? That’s been an ongoing debate in the environmental law field for over a generation. The prevailing view was stated in a famous article by Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the…
As Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was asked, “What have you given us?” He answered: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” That probably happened, but even if it didn’t, the exchange captures two fundamental truths about…
In his fine book Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein, a prominent Democrat who served in the Obama White House, stresses a key point about impeachment: grounds for impeachment should be neutral in the sense…
The most frequently quoted one-liner about impeachment is Gerald Ford’s: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers [it] to be at a given moment in history.” Former President Ford was a honorable man who…
