Perfecting Our Submission? Mann and Trump, Ruffin and Roberts

Abstract

Presidential power is vast, both under law and in practice. Who holds presidents accountable, and by what means? Much turns on the answers we provide, as well as on the justifications we establish for those answers. The majority opinion in the new presidential immunity case, Trump v. U.S., is eerily resonant, rhetorically, with a notorious judgment enhancing one person’s power over others by shielding that power utterly from criminal-law accountability. That judgment, now nearly two centuries old, is Judge Thomas Ruffin’s infamous slavery-law opinion for the North Carolina Supreme Court in State v. Mann. I juxtapose the two opinions, which share jarringly similar claims about the nature of power, rule, and accountability under law.