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Saturday Night With Elliot Richardson And Robert Bork: A Case Study In Exemplary Executive Branch Lawyering, Jason S. Harrow
Saturday Night With Elliot Richardson And Robert Bork: A Case Study In Exemplary Executive Branch Lawyering, Jason S. Harrow
Jason S Harrow
In the wake of both the “torture memos” written by the Bush Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel and the U.S. Attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, a large literature appeared criticizing the performance of high-ranking Bush-era executive branch lawyers. But there is very literature highlighting incidents of good executive branch lawyering — especially under trying circumstances.
In this article, I try to buck this trend by examining the events surrounding the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre”: the extraordinary evening in October of 1973 when President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate Special …