In After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith provide a comprehensive roadmap for reform of the presidency in the post-Trump era. In fourteen chapters they offer more than fifty concrete proposals concerning presidential conflicts of interest, foreign influence on elections, pardon power abuse, assaults on the press, law enforcement independence, Special Counsel procedures, FBI investigations of presidents and presidential campaigns, the role of the White House Counsel, war powers, control of nuclear weapons, executive branch vacancies, domestic emergency powers, how one administration should examine possible crimes by the president of a prior administration, and more. Each set of reform proposals is preceded by rich descriptions of relevant presidential history, and relevant background law and norms, that place the proposed reforms in context. All of the proposals are prefaced by a chapter that explains how Trump--and, in some cases, his predecessors--conducted the presidency in ways that justify these reforms. After Trump will thus be essential reading for the coming debate on how to reconstruct the laws and norms that constitute and govern the world's most powerful office. It's hard to imagine two better co-authors for the task. Both served in senior executive branch positions-in the administrations of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively-and have written widely on the presidency. Bob Bauer served from 2010-2011 as White House Counsel to President Barack Obama, who in 2013 named Bauer to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. He is a Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law, as well as the co-director of its Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic. Jack Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003. He is the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Together, in this book, they set the terms for the national discussion to come about the presidency, its powers, and its limits.

After the Pardon by Matilde Serao is about a housewife named Maria and her lover Marco, who is an ambassador to the English Embassy. Maria struggles with her jealous passion for Marco, who in turn, despises her husband. Excerpt: "The woman gazed at that almost deserted space, at the immense solitary church, rendered cold by the light of the moon, and the solitude of her desolate spirit and desolate heart became more profound and intense. "Maria," said a voice at her shoulder. She turned suddenly. The young man who had called her took her two hands and kissed them one after the other with tender gallantry..."

From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty. Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.

The President of the United States and the Governor of each state are empowered to grant pardons and commutations. A pardon can eliminate the collateral consequences of a conviction. A commutation can reduce the length of a sentence. In general, a pardon is sought after release from prison. A commutation, on the other hand, is used by prisoners to lessen their sentence.This easy to read guidebook is designed to assist individuals who want to apply for a pardon or commutation of sentence. The guidebook gives practical information about the process for applying for clemency, what to include in your petition, and provides answers about executive clemency in general.The guidebook is a "must have" for any individual who wants to navigate the complex process of applying for a pardon or commutation of sentence.

Until President Gerald Ford pardoned former president Richard Nixon for the Watergate scandal, most members of the public probably paid little attention to the president's use of the clemency power. Ford's highly controversial pardon of Nixon, however, ignited such a firestorm of protest that, fairly or unfairly, it may have cost him the presidency in 1976. Ever since, presidential pardons have been the subject of increased scrutiny and the focus of news media with a voracious appetite for scandal. This first book-length treatment of presidential pardons in twenty years updates the clemency controversy to consider its more recent uses-or misuses. Blending history, law, and politics into a seamless narrative, Jeffrey Crouch provides a close look at the application and scrutiny of this power. His book is a virtual primer on the subject, covering all facets from its background in English law to current applications. Crouch considers the framers' vision of how clemency would fit into the separation of powers as an "act of grace" or a check on injustice, then explains how the president and Congress have struggled for supremacy over the pardon power, with the Supreme Court generally deferring to the executive branch's desire for its broadest possible application. Before the modern era, presidents rarely interfered in the justice system to protect aides from prosecution, and Crouch examines some of the more controversial pardons in our history, from the Whiskey rebels to Jimmy Hoffa. In the wake of Watergate, he shows, the use of presidential pardons has become more controversial. Crouch assesses whether independent counsel investigations and special prosecutors have prompted the executive to use the pardon as a weapon in interbranch political warfare. He argues that the clemency power has been misused by recent presidents, who have used it to protect themselves or their subordinates, or to reward supporters. And although he concedes that Ford's pardon of Nixon reflected the framers' concerns about preserving government in a time of crisis, he argues that more recent cases involving the Iran-Contra conspirators, commodities trader Marc Rich, and vice-presidential chief-of-staff "Scooter" Libby have demonstrated a disturbing misapplication of power. In fleshing out these misuses of clemency, Crouch weighs the pros and cons of proposed amendments to the pardon power, one of the few powers that are virtually unlimited in the Constitution. The Presidential Pardon Power takes up a key issue in debates over the imperial presidency and urges that public and scholars alike pay closer attention to a dangerous trend.

In fourteen essays, supplemented by relevant sections of and amendments to the Constitution and five Federalist essays by Hamilton--provides the reader with the essential historical and political analyses of who and what shaped the presidency.

The pardon is an act of mercy, tied to the divine right of kings. Why did New York retain this mode of discretionary justice after the Revolution? And how did governors’ use of this prerogative change with the advent of the penitentiary and the introduction of parole? This book answers these questions by mining previously unexplored evidence held in official pardon registers, clemency files, prisoner aid association reports and parole records. This is the first book to analyze the histories of mercy and parole through the same lens, as related but distinct forms of discretionary decision-making. It draws on governors’ public papers and private correspondence to probe their approach to clemency, and it uses qualitative and quantitative methods to profile petitions for mercy, highlighting controversial cases that stirred public debate. Political pressure to render the use of discretion more certain and less personal grew stronger over the nineteenth century, peaking during constitutional conventionsand reaching its height in the Progressive Era. Yet, New York’s legislators left the power to pardon in the governor’s hands, where it remains today. Unlike previous works that portray parole as the successor to the pardon, this book shows that reliance upon and faith in discretion has proven remarkably resilient, even in the state that led the world toward penal modernity.