The issue focused on an area of law known as "sovereign immunity" and was first brought to public attention in the legal history of federal criminal prosecution, when civil rights attorney Jack Goldsmith decided to investigate government lawyers' failure to respond to court orders that would have forced them to turn over evidence in a lawsuit he had filed against the Department of Justice.

In his book "It's Not Your Fault: Law and Order in America," Goldsmith wrote that "if you want to see what happened to