The Ins and Outs of DOJ with Liz Oyer

I wanna start by talking about what the Justice Department does.

We often think of it as a prosecutor's office, and it is, but it does a lot more than criminal prosecutions.

Can you give us a breakdown of what different roles and responsibilities DOJ has?

Sure.

Um, you know, the, the department functions something like the federal government's principal law firm, and there are a lot of different functions that are subsumed within that.

But I think the most important work it does falls into three principal buckets.

So first, there is law enforcement, and that includes very much what you just said, Liz, criminal law enforcement, because all of federal criminal law enforcement is centralized at the Department of Justice.

That includes criminal investigations, which is what the FBI and other investigative agencies do.

They're all part of the department.

It includes the prosecutions, and it includes the things that happen after the prosecutions.

The Bureau of Prisons is in the Justice Department, and as you certainly know, the pardon attorney who advises the president on pardons is in the Justice Department, too.

There's also a lot of civil law enforcement, because not every statute that we have to abide by has criminal penalties like incarceration, and sometimes it's just fines and penalties and court injunctions.

[piano music] And much of the federal government's work on civil enforcement, environmental laws, tax laws, civil rights laws, antitrust laws, that happens at the Justice Department, too.

So that's one bucket, which I just think of as law enforcement.

Second bucket is defensive litigation.

Everything I was just talking about are situations in which the government takes somebody to court, but people outside the government take the government to court all the time.

And the Justice Department does most of the federal government's work representing the government when the government itself is sued.

This can happen when, say, somebody who is about to be deported challenges the lawfulness of their deportation, when a government contractor who provides a weapons system to the Defense Department thinks the Defense Department isn't abiding by the terms of the contract, when, when a public interest group says a whole government program is unconstitutional.

The Justice Department is representing the government in justifying what the government is doing to judges.

And then there's a third function, which I think is probably least well understood because it's the most private and the least public, and that's providing legal counsel throughout the government.

That's an internal function.

The president has a constitutional duty to, and these are the words of the Constitution, "take care that the laws be faithfully executed".

And that duty applies throughout the government to all of his appointees.

But the law is complicated.

Sometimes there aren't clear answers.