Ruti Teitel’s Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice (hereafter PVTJ) offers a timely and provocative account of how American presidents have engaged in practices of acknowledgment, contrition, and repair in the aftermath of conflict or state-inflicted harm. The book’s central claim regarding the presidential role in transitional justice—that presidential involvement in transitional justice is part of a repertoire of constitutional and political authorities—takes on particular resonance when viewed against the recent rejection of such politics by the Trump administration (2-3). Teitel situates President Obama’s well-known gestures of acknowledgment toward foreign audiences (i.e., the “apology tour”) not as idiosyncratic choices, but as part of a longer tradition through which presidents attempt to mend damaged relationships abroad. Yet the stark partisan backlash against these practices raises difficult questions about whether the presidency still possesses the structural and political capacity to engage in transitional justice. This review assesses Teitel’s analysis and explores how contemporary polarization, weakened rule-of-law norms, and diminished interbranch cooperation complicate the very practices she identifies.

PVTJ makes a notable contribution by excavating the historical and constitutional foundations of presidential transitional justice. Teitel argues that presidents, as the nation’s “chief of state” in foreign affairs, have long exercised a distinctive role in addressing the aftermath of conflict, wrongdoing, or systemic injustice.  The roots of this role are grounded in the president’s authority in foreign relations (33) and in the pardoning power, which early constitutional commentators—most notably Alexander Hamilton—saw as an essential tool of statecraft (77).  Clemency, in this conception, was not solely an instrument of mercy but a mechanism for reconstructing political communities fractured by rebellion, war, or policy failures. Teitel’s reading of executive clemency thus provides the legal and normative architecture for understanding why transitional justice might be expected to emerge from presidential, rather than legislative or judicial, initiative.

The history of pardon practices supports Teitel’s claim that clemency is foundational to presidential transitional justice.  George Washington’s pardons following the Whiskey Rebellion exemplify the Hamiltonian idea that forgiveness could reintegrate dissenting factions and help stabilize the new republic.[1] John Adams’s pardons after Fries’s Rebellion reflected similar reasoning, though their reception reveals how what is justified as conciliatory statecraft can advance electoral positioning.   According to Teitel, Andrew Johnson was a deviation from this tradition—his sweeping post–Civil War clemency program was an effort not at reconciliation but at restoring the antebellum political elite and consolidating his own power.  Ulysses Grant’s support for the Amnesty Act of 1872 represented a return to transitional logic. 

Notably, presidents used clemency to achieve more than reconciliation.  Washington sought to concretize the Federalist vision of the proper (i.e., limited) understanding of popular sovereignty. Adams’s political adversaries believed he used the pardons to seek political advantage in the electorally pivotal state of Pennsylvania.  Thomas Jefferson also used pardons to both move past the partisanship of Sedition Act convictions and to score points against partisan adversaries in the judiciary and to reinvigorate juries.[2]  Grant’s pardons were restorative to Confederate elites who were banned from office but Grant gave clemency only after Republicans had secured a sufficiently large coalition following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment that many Republicans no longer viewed former Confederates as a threat to holding power.  Taken together, these examples illuminate both the persistence of restorative statecraft in presidential practice and the difficulty of separating its constitutional and moral dimensions from more instrumental political motives.

The historical case studies also highlight an important limitation that Teitel acknowledges but does not fully explore: presidential leadership, while essential, is rarely sufficient to translate transitional visions into durable policy. Washington’s effort to reconcile with Great Britain required Senate ratification of the Jay Treaty to establish arbitration mechanisms capable of resolving outstanding disputes (57-59). By contrast, Woodrow Wilson’s aspiration for a new international order grounded in cooperation and collective security collapsed when the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League of Nations (131). These cases demonstrate that transitional justice—even when rooted in the president’s constitutional authority—depends on interbranch cooperation and, at times, broad political consensus. Presidents can articulate and initiate a transitional justice agenda, but presidents alone cannot fully institutionalize it.

The contemporary political environment magnifies these constraints. Modern polarization, combined with the rise of negative partisanship and high levels of competition between the two parties, sharply reduces the incentives for opposition parties to support a presidential initiative framed as conciliatory.[3] Interbranch cooperation has become increasingly unlikely at precisely the moments when transitional justice would require it. This dynamic helps explain why, as Teitel notes, recent presidential practices have tended to involve symbolic gestures—apologies, acknowledgments, statements of contrition—rather than treaty-based or policy/institutional reforms. Moreover, Donald Trump’s explicit repudiation of Obama’s reparative efforts transformed transitional justice into a partisan identity marker, making its pursuit even costlier for subsequent administrations. Perhaps most troubling, Trump’s use of clemency, particularly in cases involving political allies, undermined the rule-of-law principles that make the pardoning power a plausible foundation for transitional justice in the first place. When clemency becomes associated with impunity rather than restoration, its legitimacy as a tool of transitional justice is fundamentally weakened.

PVTJ ultimately succeeds in identifying a consequential but underexamined dimension of presidential authority and political development. Teitel convincingly demonstrates that American presidents have, across time, engaged in efforts to repair the nation’s moral and political standing following episodes of conflict or wrongdoing. She also persuasively grounds this practice in constitutional structure, showing how the pardoning power and the president’s diplomatic role create space for transitional justice. The account in PVTJ also invites reflection on how dramatically the political environment has changed. The institutional pathways that once enabled presidents to translate transitional visions into policy now appear obstructed by structural polarization and declining commitments to legal and constitutional norms. If the need for transitional justice persists—and contemporary developments at home and abroad suggest that it does—Teitel’s framework underscores both the possibilities and the growing limitations of presidential leadership in addressing that need.

Bradley D. Hays is an associate professor of political science at Union College. He can be reached at haysb@union.edu.