ACSBlog

by Andrew Wright, Associate Professor, Savannah Law School

Last Friday, the Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump has consulted his lawyers about granting pardons in the Russia investigation, including the possibility of a self-pardon. That would stand in stark contrast to the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) determination that a president cannot pardon himself. In 1974 under Richard Nixon, OLC stated: “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself.”

Over the weekend, the pardon debate continued. President Donald Trump claimed in a Saturday morning tweet that he has “complete power to pardon” his associates and, perhaps, himself.  A week earlier, on ABC’s This Week, Trump’s personal lawyers, Jay Sekulow, had refused to rule out the possibility that the president would pardon his associates, or even himself, in the Russia investigation. Sekulow walked back his previous statement on July 23, stating that “pardons are not on the table,” despite the Post reporting. Interestingly, he asserted that the idea of a presidential self-pardon is an open question that should be resolved in court.

by Jean R. Sternlight, Saltman Professor of Law, Boyd School of Law, UNLV

*This is part of ACSblog's Symposium on Regulatory Rollback

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just issued a new rule prohibiting financial service providers from using forced arbitration to prevent their customers from suing the company in class actions.  While many of us believe this rule is a “great win for consumers,” others are trying to gut it in Congress, in the courts, or through administrative action by the Comptroller of the Currency.

The new CFPB rule is critically important in its own right, but it is also interesting to view the battle over this rule as a microcosm of the fight we so often see between free market devotees and fans of regulation. Bankers, credit card issuers, payday lenders and the Chamber of Commerce have urged for many years that consumers should be free to “choose” to resolve disputes through individual arbitration – supposedly a quicker, cheaper better mode of dispute resolution as compared to litigation and class actions.  In contrast, those who oppose forced arbitration assert that such arbitration is unfair for consumers and bad for society as a whole.  Ultimately this battle between free marketeers and pro-regulation forces turns on principles of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, as I have detailed elsewhere.