Noah Feldman, Columnist

Supreme Court Never Imagined a Litigant Like President Trump

Here's the case for overturning precedent and freezing the dozens of cases involving the next commander in chief.

November 11, 2016 at 1:24 PM EST

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Getting sued is a big distraction.
Photographer: Thos Robinson/Getty Images

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Only two presidents have had to deal with private lawsuits while in office. One was John Kennedy, who settled a suit involving a car crash that happened during his campaign. The other was Bill Clinton, sued by Paula Jones for making sexual advances toward her when he was governor of Arkansas. President-elect Donald Trump is involved in 75 pending lawsuits. That’s a problem -- potentially a serious one.

Under the 1997 U.S. Supreme Court precedent that let Jones’s lawsuit go forward, these cases will proceed as normal unless Trump settles the ones where he’s a defendant or drops the ones where he’s a plaintiff. The basis for the Clinton v. Jones decision was the appealing idea that the president isn’t above the law. But it’s time for the Supreme Court to revisit it -- not just because a lawsuit against a sitting president can go terribly awry, but also because the time demand of dealing with private suits can seriously distract a president from fulfilling the demands of office.

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