Our Historians’ Amicus Brief in CREW v. Trump

John Mikhail, Jack Rakove, Gautham Rao, Simon Stern and I are proud to have filed our brief in CREW v. Trump on behalf of the plaintiffs on the meaning of the Emoluments clauses.  See here.

We have posted images of archival sources debunking the inaccurate claims made in the amicus brief on behalf of Trump, on the unsupported and idiosyncratic claim that the Foreign Emoluments Clause does not apply to the president. See here. The key documents by Alexander Hamilton, disproving their briefs’ claims, are images 9 and 12 on this part of the site. They show that Alexander Hamilton in fact included the president and vice president in his list of “offices under the United States,” signed and dated by Hamilton twice in the final versions.

Author: Jed Shugerman

Legal historian at Fordham Law School, teaching Torts, Administrative Law, and Constitutional History. JD/PhD in History, Yale. Red Sox and Celtics fan, youth soccer coach. Author of "The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America" (2012) on the rise of judicial elections in America. I filed an amicus brief in the Emoluments litigation against Trump along with a great team of historians. I'm working on "The Rise of the Prosecutor Politicians," a history of prosecutors and political ambition (a cause of mass incarceration), and "The Imaginary Unitary Executive," on the myths and history of presidential power in America. View all posts by Jed Shugerman