Jed Shugerman’s 2014 Stanford Law Review article about the U.S. Department of Justice was prominently featured in a New York Times piece.
As the Fordham law professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman explains it, the story is really about cutting costs, weeding out cronyism and reining in radical Republican lawyers who wanted to aggressively enforce the policies of Reconstruction. In a 2014 article in The Stanford Law Review, Shugerman points out that the creation of the Justice Department reduced the federal legal staff by one-third. While a handful of determined lawyers successfully prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members in the early years, for the most part, Shugerman told me, “the D.O.J. handcuffed the federal government’s lawyers from doing more.”
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At the time, lawyers worked all over Washington, in the State Department, the Interior Department and elsewhere. But it wasn’t until the opening in 1934 of the Justice Department’s current headquarters, an imposing building the size of a large square block, that the department became a strong institutional presence. Justice Department lawyers flexed their muscles defending the New Deal, and the agency expanded in scope.
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For all the vast sweep of the Department of Justice as a whole, much of its influence over the major political conflicts of our time, and certainly those poised to dominate the next four years, is concentrated within the civil rights division, charged as it is with ensuring equal protection under the law. With a staff of roughly 700, the division is basically the watchdog of the government and also a kind of police of the nation’s police, because it has the power to investigate departments for violations of civil rights law. It can also sue localities for discrimination in housing, education and employment, on the basis of sex, national origin, religion or disability as well as race. The division also protects the rights of people in prison and mental institutions.
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When the division was founded in 1957, it was staffed by a handful of lawyers who largely refrained from directly challenging Jim Crow in the South. But when Robert F. Kennedy became attorney general in 1961, things changed. He “had his own ambitions,” Shugerman says. “Even as J.F.K. tried to steer the ship down the middle, R.F.K. pulled it toward civil rights.” In the 1970s and early ’80s, the civil rights division’s ranks grew, attracting top law-school graduates to nonpartisan civil-service jobs. Many of them hoped to serve in the tradition of lawyers like John Doar, a Republican from Wisconsin who lived in a dorm for weeks with James Meredith, the first African-American student to attend the University of Mississippi, during his struggle to register for classes in 1962. “Most of us were liberals, and we were passionate about fighting the country’s long history of racial injustice,” says William Yeomans, who worked in the division for 24 years, beginning in 1981.
