US attorneys wield tremendous authority as the chief federal law enforcement officers in their districts. As prosecutors for the federal government, US attorneys make decisions about whether and how to pursue cases which affect individuals—defendants and their families, the victims of crimes, and other stakeholders—as well as the national, shared experience of federal law. They exercise their authority with discretion—enjoying considerable freedom over how individual cases will be handled—but not independence. How they gain and whether they keep their jobs depends upon another political actor: the president. A president could leverage his power to select US attorneys who will perfectly execute his agenda, effectively guaranteeing politicized, responsive, federal law enforcement. Does this happen in practice? This talk will discuss three examples of judicial policies prioritized by Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden to illustrate the importance of US attorney appointments for policymaking success. They show that appointment strategies and agenda setting helped shape whether these presidents could make good on their promises.

Lauren Mattioli is an assistant professor at Boston University, where she teaches and conducts research on the US presidency and federal courts. She is writing a book at the intersection of those two institutions, "US Attorneys and the President’s Judicial Agenda," which examines how the president’s power to appoint federal prosecutors serves his judiciary-specific policy goals. Her scholarly work has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Presidential Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Public Policy and Politics, Groups, and Identities. Mattioli earned her PhD in 2020 from Princeton University and was a predoctoral fellow at Emory University prior to joining the faculty at BU.

Sponsored by the Department of Government & Legal Studies with support from the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund.