Litigation
Cal. Litig. VOLUME 37, ISSUE 3, DECEMBER 2024
Content
- Attorney Proffers Post-menendez: How To Make the Risk Worth the Reward
- Chair's Column
- Climbing the Mountain Again
- Editor's Foreword: New Leadership Arrives
- How Joining the California Supreme Court Historical Society Can Benefit You
- Inside This Issue
- Over Ruled: the Human Toll of Too Much Law
- PAST SECTION CHAIRS & EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
- Postscript: Updating California's International Arbitration Code
- Reconciling the Duty of Zealous Advocacy and Civility
- Remember Korematsu?
- SECTION OFFICERS & EDITORIAL BOARD
- Selected Evidence Issues With Depositions of the Person Most Qualified/Knowledgeable In California and Federal Courts In the Ninth Circuit
- Table of Contents
- The California Supreme Court In Judicial Year 2024: the C.J. Guerrero Era Is Underway
- Who Owns This Sentence?: a History of Copyrights and Wrongs
- Working: Conversations With Essential Workers
- Presidential Immunity: Precedential Impunity?
PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY: PRECEDENTIAL IMPUNITY?
Written by William R. Slomanson
INTRODUCTION
The U.S. Supreme Court further delayed trial proceedings in the January 6 Insurrection Case against former president Donald Trump. (Trump v. United States (2024) 144 S.Ct. 1027.) That interlocutory order was unsigned and dissent free. At term’s end, the majority opinion in Trump v. United States (2024) 144 S.Ct. 2312 (Roberts, C.J.), spawned a multiple-issue remand. And it also created new presidential immunity law, while taking a number of legal options off the table.
This essay was motivated by observing political pundits, lawyers, and fellow citizens who have commented on the majority opinion, but have apparently not read it. Trial judges in the affected cases will not have that luxury. They are now bound by the Supreme Court’s expansive opinion at this early stage of the Trump-related criminal proceedings. Given the lack of prior precedent, Justice Neil Gorsuch proclaimed during oral argument, "We are writing a rule for the ages." (Camera, ‘We Are Writing A Rule for the Ages’: Supreme Court Justices Give Little Away During Oral Arguments on Scope of Trump’s Presidential Immunity (Apr. 25, 2024) U.S. News & World Report, 2024 WLNR 5353208) [One could question whether that chest-thumping dovetails with the Court’s vintage admonition that it decides constitutional cases on the narrowest grounds]; see generally Stearns, Modeling Narrowest Grounds (2021) 89 Geo. Wash.L.Rev. 461.)