I have been honored to work so closely with Seth Barrett Tillman on so many important matters. I learn a lot from Seth about so many substantive areas of the law. But I've also learned a lot from Seth about how the world works. Seth has a keen insight into government, politics, and society. Recently, Seth was interviewed by Ami Magazine, a Jewish publication, and shared some of his insights. If you want to understand what makes Tillman tick, read it all. Here are a few excerpts:
Well, sometimes presidents do commit illegalities.
Every administration is going to look back at the alleged wrongs of the prior administration as illegality. Not every mistake and not every policy misjudgment is illegality. As a young adult, I don't remember our political system being weaponized in this way. Maybe that is because I was very young during Nixon, who certainly made grievous errors.
You might remember that there was a big imbroglio over the leak of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision. Almost immediately, you saw people in the media, including the right-of-center media, talking in the language of criminality—that someone had committed a crime and ought to be prosecuted.
Why do you think that is?
The problem is that a lot of the people in the media today are former state and federal prosecutors. When you are a former prosecutor and the only thing you know is to prosecute people, it seems that more than a few often forget that there are things that are just bad but are not crimes. A bad thing can happen—a bad thing can be done—but that doesn't mean that anyone committed a crime, and we don't prosecute people just because they did something bad. This is one of the basic lessons that seems to be dying from our society. And by the way, I am a law-and-order person. …
I will also suggest another possibility: The Dobbs draft was not leaked; rather, its release may have been authorized. A Justice may have said to one of his clerks: "I'm unhappy with the way this draft is developing—I'm unhappy with ill-informed reports in the media predicting our decision and its reasoning—I'm going to tell one of my clerks that he has my permission to give it to a journalist." That might be a very egregious thing for a Justice of the Supreme Court to do, and it might be daring for a clerk to follow such guidance, but I don't know of any rule or law against such behavior. I don't know that you can prosecute a Justice or judge for leaking a draft opinion from his own court.
Seth also opines on the Hamilton Documents Imbroglio from 2017:
