Trump’s Dubious Use of Clemency Relies on Its Most Conventional Idiom

AUSTIN SARAT

Austin Sarat—Associate Provost, Associate Dean of the Faculty, and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College—comments on President Trump’s commutation of the sentence of Roger Stone. Sarat observes the pattern of Trump using his exclusive power of clemency to help those who, like Stone, committed crimes that show disdain for the legal process, and he argues that Trump seems “incapable of grasping the meaning of mercy or of understanding its place in a decent society.”

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Securities and Exchange Commission v. Quiros

Docket: 19-11409

Opinion Date: July 20, 2020

Judge: Charles R. Wilson

Areas of Law: Civil Procedure

The Eleventh Circuit vacated the district court's entry of a bar order barring appellants' claims against the settling appellees based on its conclusion that the bar order was essential to appellees' settlement because the order was essential to facilitating all settlement payments. The court held that the district court abused its discretion in entering the order, because a bar order was not essential to resolving the parties' dispute. In this case, the settling parties would have settled their dispute even without the bar order.