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The roundtable discussion, Special Counsel Investigations and Legal Ethics, of which this essay is a component, could hardly have raised a more urgent issue for American public life in our time. On May 17, 2017, only four months into the presidency of Donald Trump, and shortly after President Trump's dismissal of F.B.I. Director James Comey created a crisis of confidence in the ability of the Justice Department to investigate, fully and fairly, alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials prior to the 2016 election, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller III as Special Counsel to conduct the investigation. …

During the summer of 2018, I had occasion to write a book review of How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The book has its flaws, including practicing the kind of partisanship that it highlights and claims to deplore. But, whatever the book’s flaws, Levitsky and Ziblatt clearly demonstrate that it can happen here—our democracy can actually die—by contrasting the decline of democratic norms in America over the past forty-five years with countries in which similar experiences led to dictatorial rule. According to the authors, the fundamental change that explains the end of democratic systems is the decline …

It is a mark of how bad things are in American public life that most people who read the title of this book review will immediately understand that it refers to the current state of politics in the United States. Here is how Lawrence Lessig describes our condition in America, Compromised, one of the three books discussed in this review:

"There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things

are. Every one of us has a sense-if only a sense-that with our nation, something is not

quite right.. ..We've not been as …