The Department of Justice has always been this dangerous

Résumé détaillé

The federal government’s power to prosecute is massive and discretionary. It rests on good character and fair play — which might be no protection at all.

Rachel Maddow is the host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MS NOW. Her new book is “Department of Fate: The Promise, the Power, and the Collapse of America’s Most Consequential Institution.”

There were only a hundred government lawyers and maybe a dozen reporters on hand in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice on April 1, 1940, for a scheduled speech by the recently appointed attorney general, Robert H. Jackson. Jackson would go on to be a justice of the US Supreme Court and would win a place in world history as the chief US prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal, convicting the worst of the Nazi criminals at the public trials in Nuremberg. But in the first days of the spring of 1940, Robert H. Jackson was a little-known lawyer from the western edge of New York state.

The address Jackson prepared for the Second Annual Conference of United States Attorneys in the Great Hall that April morning was a short, sharp piece of business. He anticipated no applause lines or laugh lines; he didn’t waste words. He delivered his now-famous call for prosecutorial humility, in part in reaction to the performance of his predecessor, Frank Murphy. Murphy had settled for the attorney generalship after he lost out on his preferred job as secretary of war. He then used his position atop the Department of Justice to chase headlines. Jackson was determined to avoid and correct for Murphy’s failures.

Jackson’s speech clocked in at just under two thousand words and just under fifteen minutes. It didn’t generate much in the way of headlines. Quite an amazing thing, then, that his brief oration that day has come to be regarded as the legal equivalent of the presentation of the Ten Commandments: Attorney General Jackson descended from the mountaintop with tablets in hand, the purpose of the Department of Justice revealed, the proper role of the American prosecutor defined for the ages.

Law professors, law journal editors, historians, and journalists reference the Jackson speech…

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