Pardons is an unprecedented history of the pardon power, chronicling how British monarchs and American presidents have wielded clemency to afford mercy, reconcile societies, and exert executive supremacy. The book traces the pardon power from its origins as an attribute of absolute monarchy to its adoption by the American Framers as one of the few enumerated powers of the president of the United States. It tells the stories, human and political, of all forty-five presidents who have wielded the pardon power and of those they pardoned. The book argues that the increasing abuse of presidential clemency and the effective elimination of impeachment and criminal prosecution as constraints on presidential misconduct have made the pardon power a threat to the rule of law. To address this growing danger, Pardons calls for presidential pardon powers to be eliminated or transferred to Congress by constitutional amendment.

‘Frank Bowman's Pardons is a masterpiece. Its comprehensive, meticulous, illuminating presentation and arguments will make it the standard treatise on this subject. Moreover, its riches include definitive contributions to the constitutional analysis of hitherto neglected but now crucial subjects that have become an insistent and disturbing part of our national debate.’

Philip Bobbitt - Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence, Columbia University

‘Professor Frank Bowman has written the definitive history of presidential pardons. His book will be the gold standard for further studies of the president’s pardon power. There is no better place to look to both guide and improve understanding of the scope of this important authority.’

Michael Gerhardt - Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, University of North Carolina

‘At a moment when the pardon power in the United States has been transformed into what Bowman accurately calls a ‘political weapon,’ his careful and precise historical accounting of the metes and bounds of that authority is invaluable. It yields a book that is not just a service to legal scholarship, but also to the rule of law itself.’

Aziz Huq - University of Chicago Law School

‘This history of pardons from America’s prehistory to its present is as astonishing as it is exhaustive. Anything but an antiquarian exercise, Frank Bowman's survey concludes in a case for fundamental reform. With its origins in monarchism, even the power of mercy isn’t one that any single person in a democracy should enjoy.’

Samuel Moyn - Kent Professor of Law and History, Yale University

‘Bowman has produced a unique and invaluable account of how the kingly power of pardon came to be a feature of the American legal system, and how this unruly prerogative power has operated over the years to complement, nurture, and sometimes confound the rule of law.’

Margaret Love - former US Pardon Attorney and Executive Director, Collateral Consequences Resource Center