American Academy Discussion

The Legal Travails of Donald J. Trump

To continue the discussion of Donald Trump’s legal travails — which we began in April 2023 — now amounting to four separate indictments and 91 criminal charges, please join us for a discussion with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, New York University law professor and Just Security editor Ryan Goodman, and University of Alabama Professor of Law and former US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama Joyce Vance on September 26, just one day before the second G.O.P debate. How might the outcomes of the charges impact the 2024 presidential election, the political climate in the United States, and the future of American democracy? Moderated by Academy president Daniel Benjamin.

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and is the moderator of Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS. He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named the 15th head of the magazine, which was founded in 1857. In 2022 and 2023, The Atlantic won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the magazine industry. Under his leadership, The Atlantic has won the first Pulitzer Prizes in its history—three over the past three years—and set new audience and subscription records during his editorship. In 2020, Goldberg was named editor of the year by Adweek, which also named The Atlantic magazine of the year.

Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg served as the Middle East correspondent and then the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. Earlier in his career, he was a writer for The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He began his career as a police reporter for The Washington Post. Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he also served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and as the distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Goldberg is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for Reporting, the Daniel Pearl Award for Reporting, the Overseas Press Club’s award for human-rights reporting, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize for best investigative reporting.

Ryan Goodman is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and founding co-editor-in-chief of the online national security publication Just Security. Goodman is also co-director of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law, and is professor of politics and professor of sociology at NYU. He served as Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense (2015-2016). Before joining NYU, he was the inaugural Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School, and the Director of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a member of the Editorial Board of the American Journal of International Law. Goodman holds a JD from Yale Law School, a PhD from Yale University, and a BA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Joyce Vance is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Alabama. She served as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017, a position for which she was nominated by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Vance served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and was the co-chair of its Criminal Practice Subcommittee. As US Attorney, she was responsible for overseeing all federal criminal investigations and prosecutions in north Alabama, including matters involving civil rights, national security, cybercrime, public corruption, health care and corporate fraud, violent crime and drug trafficking. She was also responsible for affirmative and defensive civil litigation on behalf of the government and for all federal criminal and civil appeals. She is a frequent legal commentator on MSNBC and other news outlets.