James Tierney

Iowa Democrat Tom Miller, the longest-ever serving state attorney general who took on everyone from Big Tobacco to Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, was…

The attorney general’s race rarely grabs front-page headlines — but experts and advocates across the political spectrum say the position is one of the most…

Elizabeth Strout didn’t bat an eyelash when I admitted, moments after meeting her, that I’d snapped the handle off the toilet in her agent’s bathroom.

To be the attorney general of Massachusetts, the “people’s lawyer” as the position is sometimes called, does it matter how much and what type of…

As the country grapples with states’ newfound power to regulate abortion in the aftermath of this summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision, state attorney general candidates…

Nothing has been able to kill scam robocalls — not federal regulation, not individual state lawsuits, not private software. Each effort has made a dent,…

Donald Trump hadn’t even taken office before Attorney General Maura Healey vowed to fight him in court. In a November 2016 fund-raising appeal to supporters,…

As soon as President Biden announced his plan to require large employers to mandate vaccines, Republicans vowed to block him. “I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration,” tweeted Gov. Brian Kemp. ...They vowed to block it, although they have to wait for the federal rule to be finalized before going to court. “This is a serious and coordinated effort,” says Jim Tierney, who directs a clinic on attorneys general at Harvard Law School. “This cannot possibly be a surprise to the Biden administration.”

Coronavirus cases have surged to their highest levels yet, but conservative state legislators across the U.S. are fighting to limit governors’ ability to impose public health restrictions — and have succeeded in two states with rising caseloads in the heaviest hit region of the country. In public health emergencies, governors have broad powers to impose quarantines and other actions to stop the spread of disease. As emergency orders have stretched on for months, state lawmakers around the country have objected to what they say is governors’ unprecedented use of power for such an extended period of time. The efforts to limit their power have targeted governors across party lines, but those that have had the most success have been in states with Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures...With more states imposing restrictions again to combat rapidly rising case rates, the number of challenges is only likely to increase. “As time has gone on, there's been Covid fatigue, and that’s resulted in more legal challenges,” said James Tierney, a Harvard Law School lecturer and director of its attorney general clinic. “Unfortunately, a lot of public health issues have become political and not scientific in the last three or four months.”

During President Donald Trump's four years in office, his administration has sparred in court with state attorneys general over nearly every issue. Among the topics: the "travel ban"; the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA; family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border; the "national emergency" declaration to build the border wall; international student visas; student loan protections; clean water rules; transgender health care protections; automobile emissions; a citizenship question on the 2020 census; U.S. Postal Service operations; and Obamacare. If it seems like a lot, it is. A review of litigation against federal agencies during the Trump administration shows that state attorneys general have filed 138 multistate lawsuits since he took office...James Tierney, a Democratic former attorney general of Maine who is now a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said Trump has largely himself to blame for the flurry of lawsuits after he used executive orders and other directives to push his agenda, often bypassing Congress and administrative laws. "Depending on what President Biden does — and more importantly, how he does it — GOP AGs can be expected to sue," Tierney said. "How often and to what degree of success will depend on what President Biden actually does."

President Trump has initiated the most aggressive environmental deregulation agenda in modern history, but as his first term drives to a close, many of his policies are being cut down by the courts — even by Republican-appointed jurists who the administration had hoped would be friendly. Those losses have actually heightened the stakes in the election and the fight over a replacement on the Supreme Court for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A second term, coupled with a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, could save some of his biggest environmental rollbacks. Since January courts have dealt a series of blows to the Trump administration’s plans to ramp up fossil fuel development and undo decades of environmental protections. This month, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked implementation of a major rollback of methane emissions standards for the oil and gas industry while it considers permanent action... if Joseph R. Biden Jr. gets into the White House in January, he will have to provide a written explanation of the reasons he wants to roll back each Trump administration action. Eliminating Trump’s executive orders will be relatively easy, but going through the regulatory process all over again on issues like fuel efficiency...James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who now teaches courses at Harvard Law School on the role of attorneys general, said that they are “institutionally designed to be independent watchdogs, independent brakes on power.” Their relative independence from executive power, whether in their own state or the federal government, goes back to the thirteen original colonies, and, before that, English common law. “If there’s a Democratic president, roll up your sleeves and wait for Texas to file lawsuits against President Biden,” he said.

President Trump has initiated the most aggressive environmental deregulation agenda in modern history, but as his first term drives to a close, many of his policies are being cut down by the courts — even by Republican-appointed jurists who the administration had hoped would be friendly. Those losses have actually heightened the stakes in the election and the fight over a replacement on the Supreme Court for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A second term, coupled with a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, could save some of his biggest environmental rollbacks. Since January courts have dealt a series of blows to the Trump administration’s plans to ramp up fossil fuel development and undo decades of environmental protections...In 2018, a federal judge in Montana ordered the Trump administration and TransCanada to stop work on the Keystone XL pipeline, saying Mr. Trump’s approval of the project violated laws by ignoring facts about climate change...He and other regulatory experts noted that if Joseph R. Biden Jr. gets into the White House in January, he will have to provide a written explanation of the reasons he wants to roll back each Trump administration action. Eliminating Trump’s executive orders will be relatively easy, but going through the regulatory process all over again on issues like fuel efficiency standards will take time. That would make lawsuits brought by Democratic attorneys general all the more important because they will have kept many rules from going into effect while their replacements wind their way through the regulatory process...James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who now teaches courses at Harvard Law School on the role of attorneys general, said that they are “institutionally designed to be independent watchdogs, independent brakes on power.” Their relative independence from executive power, whether in their own state or the federal government, goes back to the thirteen original colonies, and, before that, English common law.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, facing intense backlash over cost-cutting moves that Democrats, state attorneys general and civil rights groups warn could jeopardize mail-in voting, said on Tuesday that the Postal Service would suspend those operational changes until after the 2020 election. The measures, which included eliminating overtime for mail carriers, reducing post office hours and removing postal boxes, have been faulted for slowing mail delivery and criticized as an attempt to disenfranchise voters seeking to vote safely during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. DeJoy, a major donor to President Trump who was tapped in May to run the Postal Service...said retail hours at the post office would not change, no mail processing facilities would be closed, and overtime would continue to be approved “as needed.” It was unclear, however, whether the agency would reverse measures already put in place across the country that union officials and workers say have inflicted deep damage to the Postal Service. That includes the removal of hundreds of mail-sorting machines, according to a June 17 letter sent from the Postal Service to the American Postal Workers Union. Some of those machines have already been destroyed, union officials and workers said. The announcement came as lawmakers summoned Mr. DeJoy to testify before the House and the Senate in the coming days and as two coalitions of at least 20 state attorneys general said they would file lawsuits against the Trump administration over the postal changes...The states plan to pursue their lawsuit despite Mr. DeJoy’s announcement on Tuesday. James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine and a professor at Harvard Law School, said the lawsuit provided assurance to the attorneys general that the postmaster general would follow through on his promise. “The attorneys general don’t trust the word of the Postal Service,” Mr. Tierney said. “They feel more comfortable having this done in open court.”

Though it ticks off detailed examples of wrongdoing, the New York lawsuit claiming donors to the National Rifle Association have been ripped off for years is likely to be settled without the gun-rights group being forced to dissolve, legal experts said. In a sweeping 164-page complaint on Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James said the NRA must be disbanded because of the “breadth and depth” of the frauds carried out by four current and former officials accused of squandering the non-profit’s cash on corrupt personal expenses. But that drastic measure is just a starting point that could serve to push the NRA to make major personnel concessions and pay steep fines to avoid the risk of going to trial or being forced to shutter the organization...The suit filed against the NRA in Manhattan alleges the New York-chartered group was duped out of more than $60 million in the last three years alone as a result of financial sleights of hand by four current and former officials, including the NRA’s embattled longtime leader and public face Wayne LaPierre. James is seeking an injunction that would bar the four men from ever serving as fiduciaries of nonprofits. She said they got inflated salaries, used NRA assets for extravagant spending and arranged no-show contracts for insiders -- claims the NRA vehemently denies...James Tierney, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who has taught courses on the role of state attorneys general, said the NRA’s suit is “foolish” and that the New York case is an “appropriate” response to the NRA’s refusal to cooperate. “This case has been developed by highly sophisticated people who’ve been in the business of charities regulation since long before Tish James,” said Tierney, who served as attorney general of Maine for a decade until 1990. “These people have gone through thousands of pages of documents and they’re accountants -- they’ve tracked all the numbers over the years.”

An article by Peter Brann and James Tierney: Last Friday, the partisan leadership at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington claimed that it knew better than Gov. Mills what should be done in Maine in the COVID-19 pandemic. They argued to a federal court in Maine that Gov. Mills’ emergency order mandating a 14-day self-quarantine for out-of-state visitors was unconstitutional (which is rich irony, given that they have also argued in favor of banning altogether persons in affected countries from even entering the country to slow the virus’ spread). Later the same day, U.S. District Judge Lance Walker rebuffed their efforts, finding: “The governor’s executive orders are informed by a desire to preserve public health in the face of a pandemic. Striking down the quarantine order would seriously undermine her efforts and, based on the current record, would effectively disregard the balance of powers established by our federal system.” The decision is preliminary, and so there is little doubt that the Justice Department will press its arguments, safe in the knowledge that they will not have to suffer the consequences if our parents, children and neighbors are infected by asymptomatic out-of-staters coming to Maine. If today’s Justice Department had only considered its own prior actions, it would know better.

An article by Peter Brann and James Tierney: Maine is not immune from a virus that knows no borders as it sweeps across the world, stealing the lives of loved ones. To keep ourselves safe, we have also lost many of the things we hold dear, such as graduations, summer fairs and family get-togethers. To combat this plague, Gov. Janet Mills has invoked emergency powers to protect the health and safety of all Mainers. Every state governor has always had extensive emergency powers, and when they are invoked following hurricanes, tornados and other disasters, no one blinks an eye. Now we face the largest worldwide pandemic in more than a century, which has killed nearly 100,000 people in the United States and sickened more than 1,670,000 people in the United States (and more than 5,500,000 worldwide). A small minority nonetheless have gone to court to claim that Mills is violating their constitutional right to do whatever they want whenever they want, effectively claiming a constitutional right to endanger the rest of us. These lawsuits lack merit and mangle our national heritage. In the debate over whether to send troops to fight the Revolutionary War, Patrick Henry famously said, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Unfortunately, the critics challenging Mills’ emergency orders fighting the COVID-19 pandemic essentially misquote Henry, arguing instead, “Give me liberty and give me death!” Fortunately, the Constitution strikes a different balance.