Associate Professor, Justice Studies, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Ruti Teitel’s Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice marks a significant and timely intervention in transitional justice scholarship. Reminiscent of her earlier, field-defining work, the book nevertheless introduces a decisive shift: it turns the lens inward, away from the Global South and toward the U.S. presidency itself. For decades, transitional justice has been imagined as something that happens elsewhere, such as in Argentina, South Africa, or the Balkans. Teitel reframes that geography. She shows that the United States, too, is a transitional polity, perpetually negotiating between past wrongdoing and future promise. In doing so, she invites us to read presidential power not only as constitutional authority but as a moral and performative force.
The inward turn: the executive as a site of justice
This inward turn raises a set of provocative questions. Transitional justice is most often studied through courts, truth commissions, or civil-society initiatives. In Teitel’s account, however, the executive, the very seat of sovereign power, emerges as a principal site of moral reckoning. Her chapters on Presidents Obama, Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt collectively trace what might be called an “American grammar of reconciliation”: acknowledgment, restraint, and the willingness to step away from power.
Obama’s site-conscious speeches, including in Havana, Buenos Aires, and Hiroshima, read as acts of lawmaking through memory. Here, the executive voice substitutes for tribunals or truth commissions; speech itself becomes a vehicle of accountability. As Teitel underscores through Obama’s own words, “the law is also memory.” Transitional justice, in this reading, is less an institutional checklist than a disposition: a readiness of the state to engage its conscience publicly.
Yet this reframing also exposes a tension at the heart of executive power. Can the same office that authorizes drones, sanctions, and secrecy also deliver contrition? Teitel does not resolve this tension so much as insist that we confront it directly. The presidency, she suggests, can embody both the dangers of exceptionalism and the possibilities of ethical self-limitation.
Presidential power and the post-9/11 legacy
This insight resonates strongly with recent debates over the scope of presidential authority. Read alongside journalistic and legal accounts of the Cheney years, Teitel’s analysis highlights two competing presidential legacies. On one side stands the unitary-executive model, asserting expansive authority in the name of security. On the other hand stands what Teitel describes as a “reckoning presidency,” exemplified by Obama’s efforts to restore moral accountability through acknowledgment and restraint.
Transitional justice thus appears as a counter-tradition within the presidency itself. More precisely, a strand of self-limiting power. At the same time, the durability of this tradition remains fragile. The post-9/11 expansion of executive privilege created an infrastructure of secrecy that any later reconciliation must first pierce. Obama’s apologies and acknowledgments can therefore be read as attempts to reclaim moral authority eroded during that period, even as they remained vulnerable to reversal. In this sense, Presidential Visions situates transitional justice squarely within constitutional debates about executive power, rather than treating it as an external or exceptional process.
Washington, the founders, and executive self-restraint
Teitel’s backward movement, from Obama to Washington, is particularly illuminating. Washington’s emphasis on arbitration, trade, and restraint reveals an early logic of transitional justice embedded in the founding period. The Jay Treaty, negotiated in the aftermath of revolutionary conflict, was not merely about debts or borders; it was an effort to establish normative trust between former enemies.
Crucially, Washington and John Jay also understood when to relinquish power. In the absence of formal term limits, Washington’s voluntary exit enacted a performative self-limitation. In this context, it could be viewed as an early U.S. version of executive accountability through departure. Read against today’s permanent campaigns and extended presidential ambitions, this founding ethic of moderation appears strikingly distant. Teitel’s account helps us see that distance is both a constitutional and moral loss.
Presidential Speech as Hegemonic Accountability: Memory, Legitimacy, and Fragile Law
From an international relations perspective, Teitel’s argument raises a fundamental question: can a hegemon practice transitional justice toward itself? Great powers routinely design accountability mechanisms for others while exempting themselves from comparable scrutiny. Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice gestures toward an alternative model of hegemonic self-accountability; one in which acknowledgment, apology, and restraint function not as admissions of weakness, but as sources of legitimacy.
Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric exemplifies this move. His speeches at sites such as Hiroshima, Laos, and Buenos Aires reframe soft power as moral power: the capacity to admit wrongdoing as a basis for renewed partnership. These moments do not rely on courts, treaties, or truth commissions. Instead, they operate through what Teitel compellingly conceptualizes as speech functioning as performative law. Words delivered at symbolically charged sites perform juridical work without formal legal apparatuses. They create a public record of acknowledgment that may be contested, diluted, or ignored—but not fully erased.
In this sense, the Obama chapter reads as a case study in memory politics at the highest level of state power. Speech becomes a mechanism through which the hegemon names its own violence, situates itself within a longer historical arc, and gestures toward ethical self-limitation. Teitel’s analysis here resonates strongly with Hannah Arendt’s insight that promising and forgiving are foundational political acts. The president, in this reading, serves simultaneously as witness and steward of national memory, shaping how past harm is narrated and how future responsibility is imagined.
Yet the very reliance on presidential speech exposes the limits of this model. Because such accountability is self-imposed rather than institutionally anchored, it remains politically precarious. The pendulum swing from Obama to Trump underscores how easily performative reckoning can be undone. While speech may function as a law-like act of recognition, it lacks the binding force necessary to survive shifts in political power. Acknowledgment without institutionalization remains vulnerable to erasure, reversal, or outright repudiation.
Teitel thus situates presidential speech at an uneasy intersection: it is both a powerful technology of hegemonic accountability and a fragile substitute for durable justice mechanisms. Words can open space for reckoning, recalibrate legitimacy, and momentarily restrain power. But they cannot, on their own, secure accountability across administrations. The promise of presidential self-reckoning, Presidential Visions suggests, lies precisely in this tension: between what speech can accomplish and what it cannot ultimately guarantee.
Cyclical transitions and unfinished reconciliation
Teitel’s core question, why the United States is different, takes on renewed urgency in the current political moment. The United States appears locked in a permanent condition of transition, marked by polarization, debates over executive immunity, and ongoing foreign-policy crises. Perhaps it is different precisely because its transitions are cyclical rather than terminal. The presidency itself functions as a recurring site of reckoning, reopening unresolved questions each generation. But this also means that reconciliation remains perpetually unfinished, deferred from one administration to the next. In the U.S. context, transitional justice becomes less a destination than an ongoing struggle over memory, power, and restraint.
The future of ethical statecraft
If Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice is both historical analysis and normative intervention, it leaves us with a pressing question: what vision of ethical statecraft remains possible today? Can presidential leadership still offer moral direction in an era of populist retrenchment and global fatigue? Or do we need new, more distributed forms of self-restraint—anchored across institutions rather than embodied in a single office—to recover the possibility of justice after crisis? Teitel’s work ultimately reminds us that transitional justice is not only about reckoning with the past. It is about cultivating the capacity to stop, to step down, and to listen. In that sense, it is as much a civic virtue as a legal project—one that the presidency, at its best, still has the power to model.
Suggested citation: Arnaud Kurze, Symposium on Ruti Teitel’s Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice, Part II: Transitional Justice and the U.S. Presidency: Mapping Ideas of Statecraft, Responsibility, and the Future, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Mar. 26, 2026, at: https://www.iconnectblog.com/symposium-on-ruti-teitels-presidential-visions-of-transitional-justice-part-2-transitional-justice-and-the-u-s-presidency-mapping-ideas-of-statecraft-responsibility-and-the-future/