In his four years as president, Donald Trump has used the office's executive clemency power to pardon or commutate the sentences of political allies, enablers, Republican party players and donors, as well as controversial military figures charged with war crimes. With his term soon coming to an end, concern is growing that President Trump will extend clemency to additional allies, to family members, and even to himself. Join the American Constitution Society for a discussion about the reach, limits, and effect of executive clemency, the process by which requests for clemency should evaluated, and what role, if any, Congress and the courts might play in addressing potentially improper exercises of the pardon power.
Welcome Remarks:
Russ Feingold, President, American Constitution Society
Featuring:
Kim Atkins, Senior Opinion Writer, The Boston Globe; Contributor, MSNBC (Moderator)
Rachel Barkow, Vice Dean and Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy; Faculty Director, Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, NYU Law
Larry Kupers, Kupers Law; former Deputy and Acting Pardon Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney
Joined by the insight that the "the economy" cannot be separated from questions of power, distribution, and democracy, a growing group of legal scholars has begun to center questions of law and political economy ("LPE") as part of a critical transformation in legal thought. ACS is pleased to join with the LPE Project in hosting an online course introducing students to LPE analysis. LPE frameworks highlight law's role in the perpetuation of racial and gender injustice, the devaluation of social and ecological reproduction, and the violence of the carceral state under capitalism, and to explore concrete legal reforms designed to move beyond neoliberalism and toward a genuinely responsive, egalitarian democracy, with critical attention to the need for power and movement-building as part of any such transformation.
How does an LPE approach reframe constitutional law? How does constitutional law interact with social hierarchy and economic power? Is the Constitution friend, enemy, or frenemy of democracy? In this lecture, Professor Purdy will address these questions as well as illustrate how an LPE approach can recenter questions of power and the economic dimensions of constitutional law that are all too often positioned as beyond the Constitution's reach.
Suggested Readings:
No Democracy
Why Law & Political Economy?
Featuring:
Jedediah Britton-Purdy, William S. Beinecke Professor of Law, Columbia Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Law and Political Economy Project
With Commentary from:
Amy Kapczynski, Professor of Law, Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and Faculty Co-Director of the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency, Yale Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Law and Political Economy Project; cofounder, Law and Political Economy blog.
Ganesh Sitaraman, Professor of Law, ACS Faculty Advisor, and Director of the Program in Law and Government, Vanderbilt Law School; Member, ACS Board of Directors and Board of Academic Advisors.
ACS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. It does not support political parties or candidates for public office.
For the first time in our nation's history, half of all states in the country have either outright banned or declared moratoria on capital punishment. Even in states that maintain the death penalty, capital prosecutions and executions have steadily declined in recent years, with just four counties in Texas and one in Missouri accounting for over fifty percent of executions in the past ten years. At the same time, support for capital punishment is at a near half-century low, with sixty percent of Americans supporting life in prison over the death penalty. What do these trends tell us about the future of the death penalty in America? Can we continue to justify its use as we attempt to reckon with the estimated 170 people previously sentenced to death who have been exonerated and the overwhelming evidence of racism in its application? When a penalty is imposed so infrequently and seemingly arbitrarily based on geography, race, and even happenstance, can it survive good-faith constitutional scrutiny?
Introduction:
Russ Feingold, President, American Constitution Society
Featuring:
Maurice Chammah, Staff Writer for the Marshall Project; Author of the forthcoming book Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty (Moderator)
Terrica Redfield Ganzy, Deputy Director at the Southern Center for Human Rights
Sam Kamin, Professor of Law at University of Denver, Sturm College of Law
Laura Porter, Executive Director of the 8th Amendment Project
