First 100 Days – Biden : University of Illinois Law Review

Examining Biden's First 100 Days in Office

During his first 100 days in office in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed fifteen major bills into law and issued a series of executive orders directed at pulling the nation out of economic depression. Ever since, presidents have taken office with high public expectations for their first 100 days. The 100-day marker is likely a poor overall gauge of a successful presidency: Abraham Lincoln is among the greatest presidents of all time and, yet, during his first 100 days in the White House, the country split apart. Recognizing the deficiency of the measure, John F. Kennedy sought to end 100-day evaluations. After reciting a list of pledges in his own inaugural address in 1961, Kennedy said: “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.” Yet voters do not wait a lifetime for results—and presidents cannot even avoid the scrutiny that Day 100 brings.

When President Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021, COVID-19 had already killed 400,000 Americans. Two weeks before Biden’s inauguration, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to count the electoral college votes and certify Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, falsely claimed the election had been stolen because of widespread fraud and cheating. As Biden took the oath of office, millions of Trump supporters held fast to the belief that the election was rigged and Trump’s departure an injustice. At the other extreme, some Democrats, mistaking election for revolution, called for truth commissions, purges of enemies, and other tools suited only to actual political transformations.
Read more...

“I will work to be a president who seeks not to divide but unify. I won’t see red states and blue states, I will always see the United States.”

Joe Biden - November 8, 2020

Topics of discussion

Symposium authors

Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Professor of Law, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Daniel and Cynthia Mah Helle Professor in Finance and Director of the Center for Business and Public Policy at Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Assistant Professor of Finance, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Senior Scholar, Institute for Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois

Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School

Guy Raymond Jones Chair in Law, University of Illinois

Michelle Layser

Assistant Professor of Law, University of Illinois

Teaching Professor of Law, University of Illinois

Teaching Assistant Professor, University of Illinois College of Law

Margareth Etienne

Associate Dean and Carl L. Vacketta Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law

Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Professor, Santa Clara University School of Law

Professor of Law, Drexel University Kline School of Law; Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

Lindsay Young Distinguished Professor, University of Tennessee College of Law

Foundation Professor of Criminology, Justice and Law and Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University

Jared Hamernick

J.D. Candidate 2021, University of Illinois College of Law; Managing Articles Editor, University of Illinois Law Review, 2020

Professor of Law, U.C. Davis School of Law

Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University

Jonathan Hafetz

Professor of Law, Seton Hall University School of Law

Washington Director, the Center for Victims of Torture

Director, ACLU National Security Project; Lecturer in Law, Columbia Law School

Michael Helfand

Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Faculty & Research, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law; Visiting Professor and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Fellow, Yale Law School; and Senior Fellow, Shalom Hart-man Institute of North America

Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School

Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

RonNell Andersen Jones

Teitelbaum Chair & Professor of Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law

Howard W. Hunter Professor of Law, Brigham Young University Law School

Heidi Kitrosser

Robins Kaplan Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School; Newton N. Minow Visiting Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Robert F. Wagner Professor of Labor and Employment Law at New York Law School

John D. Colombo Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law

Ross and Helen Workman Chair in Law and Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois College of Law

Teaching Assistant Professor, University of Illinois College of Law Library

Teaching Fellow, Program in Environmental Law & Policy and Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School

Professor & Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois College of Law

Associate Professor, Political Science, Rockford University

Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law

Professor of Law, University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University School of Law

Callejo Endowed Professor of Law, Gerald J. Ford Research Fellow, Southern Methodist University, Dedman School of Law

Professor of Law, College of Law, and Affiliate, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Permanent Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law, University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law

Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law, University Professor of History at Pepperdine University

Professor, South Texas College of Law Houston

Seth Barrett Tillman

Lecturer, Maynooth University Department of Law, Ireland (Roinn Dlí Ollscoil Mhá Nuad)

Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School