Lawfare Daily: Trials of the Trump Administration, May 2
Listen to the May 2 livestream.
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
In a live conversation on May 2, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, and Roger Parloff and Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce to discuss the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, the decision by a judge that the Alien Enemies Act invocation did not meet the invasion requirement in the law, litigation surrounding the dismantling of agencies across the executive branch, legal challenge to DOGE’s access to information at the Social Security Administration, and more.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Scott R. Anderson is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He previously served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and as the legal advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Anna Bower is a senior editor at Lawfare. Anna holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Cambridge and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. She joined Lawfare as a recipient of Harvard’s Sumner M. Redstone Fellowship in Public Service. Prior to law school, Anna worked as a judicial assistant for a Superior Court judge in the Northeastern Judicial Circuit of Georgia. She also previously worked as a Fulbright Fellow at Anadolu University in Eskişehir, Turkey.
A native of Georgia, Anna is based in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Roger Parloff is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. For 12 years, he was the main legal correspondent at Fortune Magazine. His work has also been published in ProPublica, The New York Times, New York, NewYorker.com, Yahoo Finance, Air Mail, IEEE Spectrum, Inside, Legal Affairs, Brill’s Content, and others. An attorney who no longer practices, he is the author of "Triple Jeopardy," a book about an Arizona death penalty case. He is a senior editor at Lawfare.
James Pearce worked at the Department of Justice for over a decade until January 2025. In the Criminal Division at Main Justice, he worked in the Appellate Section and in the Public Integrity Section. He served as a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney’s Offices in Maryland (Greenbelt) and in the District of Columbia. He also worked for Special Counsel Jack Smith.
