Law is the basic medium of government; that is why it is nearly impossible to imagine a good and effective Presidential administration without a good and effective Department of Justice. The past eight years have taken a sorry toll on the morale, prestige, and influence of the Justice Department, and few tasks facing the incoming Administration will be more important than repairing and restoring the federal government’s chief law office.In November Berkeley Law and the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice brought together a select group of scholars from across the country, several of them Justice Department alumni, for a one-day symposium on DOJ’s future. (Papers from the symposium will be published online early next year in Issues in Legal Scholarship, a peer-reviewed journal edited at Berkeley Law.) A striking degree of consensus emerged on three points. Read the rest of this entry »
