history of social work in uk essay pdf

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section History of Social Work in the United Kingdom

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• The Charity Organisation Society and the Settlement Movement
• Philanthropy, Volunteerism, Moral Welfare, and Social Work
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History of Social Work in the United Kingdom by Caroline Skehill LAST REVIEWED: 15 February 2010 LAST MODIFIED: 15 February 2010 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389678-0051

This entry provides an overview of social work in the United Kingdom, which refers to Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland) and Northern Ireland. (The more accurate historical name for the United Kingdom is Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but generally this is abbreviated to the United Kingdom or sometimes just to England.) The complex history of the two islands makes it difficult to provide a general overview of social work in the United Kingdom per se. A complex set of relations marked the individual countries’ histories over a number of centuries and is explained in the more detailed histories of the jurisdictions in other entries. In terms of the modern history, from 1800 the four countries England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland were unified. After the war of independence and subsequent civil war in Ireland between 1919 and 1921, twenty-six counties of Ireland became a free state, and six—Northern Ireland—remained part of the United Kingdom. The history of social work spans over 150 years, though the period covered in this entry is roughly 1870 to 1980. Each section of this entry has a mixture of retrospective histories written in the present or the recent past and samples of important resources from different periods that reflect the nature of social work at particular moments in time. Where possible, major policy documents and archival sources are also cited. A complex set of relations marked the individual countries’ histories over a number of centuries. In terms of the history of social work, practice in the United Kingdom shares many common features in terms of models of practice, development of the profession, dominant theories, legislation and policy, and training approaches. The vast majority of literature on which an understanding of United Kingdom social work is built within national and international contexts derives from histories relating to Great Britain or England. The diversity of history within the broader United Kingdom is highlighted in this general entry and in the more specific entries on Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

For those unfamiliar with the subject, introductory chapters aimed at beginning social work students provide some useful mapping, such as Horner 2003 and Wilson, et al. 2008 , which highlights some of the major transitions in the profession in the 20th century. Payne 2005 is the most comprehensive single modern text available, though it offers a broad general overview of history from an international perspective rather than focusing on the United Kingdom. The classic, most-cited text on social work is Woodroofe 1962 , followed by Seed 1973 .

Horner, Nigel. 2003. The beginnings of social work; The comfort of strangers; Formalising and consolidating social work as a profession. In What is social work? 2d ed. By Nigel Horner. Exeter, UK: Learning Matters.

These are basic introductory chapters aimed at beginning students of social work. They map the origins of social work from philanthropy and the development of social work as a profession through the 20th century. Though introductory, they are helpful overviews of some of the main developments and are particularly useful for new researchers.

Payne, Malcolm. 2005. The origins of social work: Continuity and change . Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Provides a general overview of the history of social work with an emphasis on developments in Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, other Western democracies. Overall it provides a broad international perspective that makes it a particularly useful reference resource.

Seed, Philip. 1973. The expansion of social work in Britain . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

This book from the 1970s provides an early history of social work with a focus on its development as a profession. It was written at a time when a major shift had occurred in the organization of social work training from specialist education (mostly in child care, psychiatry, or hospital social work) to a generic model.

Wilson, Kate, Gillian Ruch, Mark Lymbery, and Andrew Cooper. 2008. The development of social work: Key themes and critical debates. In Social work: An introduction to contemporary practice . By Kate Wilson, Gillian Ruch, Mark Lymbery, and Andrew Cooper. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman.

As in the case of Horner 2003 , this reference is intended specifically to help students develop a beginning understanding of historical perspectives in social work. It is a useful introduction to history that introduces some critical themes to reflect on in terms of how history is interpreted and understood.

Woodroofe, Kathleen. 1962. From charity to social work in England and the United States . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

One of the most well-known and widely cited books relating to the history of social work in the United Kingdom. It charts the history of social work in both England and the United States, thus giving a broad international perspective. It focuses in particular on the development of social work from a philanthropic activity to an organized profession. It is also an interesting moment-in-time reflection as the first edition was published in the early 1960s.

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A New History of Social Work: Values and Practice in the Struggle for Social Justice, John H. Pierson

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David Saltiel, A New History of Social Work: Values and Practice in the Struggle for Social Justice, John H. Pierson, The British Journal of Social Work , Volume 53, Issue 2, March 2023, Pages 1267–1269, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcac089

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What can a historical perspective teach us? Pierson argues that taking a ‘social justice’ perspective to history uncovers social work’s past prejudices and examines its relationship to a changing society. The risk is to assume that current attitudes are the ideal and to apply them to the past without properly considering the historical context but Pierson takes a more judicious approach—he’s alive to the prejudices and oppressions of the past whilst acknowledging that our progress to a more socially equitable society still has a long way to go.

It’s worth noting that Pierson’s is a history of British social work—there is nothing inevitable about the way the profession has developed in the UK and some comparative case studies from other countries might have been illuminating.

Pierson argues that his approach focuses on ‘street level engagement’ between professionals and service users, highlighting common themes between social work in the past and today. He begins in the post-Napoleonic period and the relatively generous provisions of the Poor Law before the 1834 Amendment. Welfare, he argues, was embedded in British society long before the post-1945 welfare state. The early chapters are the most engaging: Pierson uses historical records and case studies to bring these sections alive. Highlights for me were a balanced discussion of the Charity Organisation Society, showing how its often excellent practical and theoretical work was undermined by a rigidly individualistic philosophy of personal responsibility and a fascinating chapter on the womens’ settlement movement from which grew the first formal training courses (because, unlike with mens’ settlements, there were no subsequent career paths for the women to follow). The pioneering course at Liverpool University, established in 1905, faced dilemmas that many educators today will find familiar as—in a later chapter—did the expansion of social work courses at the London School of Economics in the 1950s. Should they be generic? Should they be dominated by a psychiatric approach? There is much to consider and reflect on in these earlier chapters as Pierson discusses the rise of psychoanalytic casework, the ‘mental hygiene’ movement, debates over exactly what sort of ‘guidance’ Child Guidance Clinics ought to offer.

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29 June 2023:  Peering into historical reviews of social work: Qualitative research and autobiography . (Hybrid event)

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The 8 March 2023 meeting of the SWHN was The Uncertain Place of ‘Community’ in Social Work , a hybrid event at King's College London. We hope to post a recording of the event.

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Banner photo at the top of this page: A detail from 'The Almoner of the Great Northern Hospital at work'. The Hospital and health review, 1921. Credit:   Wellcome Collection .

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Comparative histories of the development of social work across the Commonwealth (PDF)

Viennese social workers in British exile. Children's social work. Almoners. Ann Oakley. (PDF)

December 2020

Settlements & social reform. Teaching social work history. History of social work research. (PDF)

NHS and Community Care Act 1990. Ministry of Health. Neoliberalism. Joyce Rimmer. (PDF)

Service user involvement. Marianne Mason. Clement Attlee. Elizabeth Macadam. (PDF)

Clement Attlee and the social service idea. Women's mental health activism. (PDF)

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Bob Holman. Attlee, Toynbee Hall. BJSW. Social work and received ideas. (PDF)

A century of child care law. Historic lessons from Serious Case Reviews. Edith Emily Mudd. (PDF)

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Women and girls in World War I. History from below. Tina Goldberg. Rupert Hughes. (PDF)

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History of Social Work in the United Kingdom

 contents.

• Introduction 

Role of the Church

Welfare becomes a state responsibility, the elizabethan poor law 1601, influence of the elizabethan poor law.

• The Poor Law Revisions: 1834-1909 

The Beveridge Report

• Beginnings of the COS Movement and Settlement House Movement 

Introduction

In primitive society, sometimes known as 'folk society,' the wider family or tribe assumed responsibility for people whose needs could not be provided in the traditional manner. Children who had lost their parents were placed in relatives' homes or adopted by childless couples. Food was divided among family members and neighbours. When the feudal system gave way to the wage economy, laws were passed to force the impoverished to work. Begging was punishable with whippings, imprisonment, and even death.

The folk tradition lasted in Europe during the early Christian era, and the faithful considered it a religious obligation to care for those members of the group who were unable to care for themselves. The greatest source of charitable motivation was religion. The church, particularly the monasteries, became distribution centres for food, medical aid, and shelter. The parish priest and other clerics who knew the individuals and their circumstances gave alms collected in the parish.

The severe legislation prohibiting begging and vagrancy is the first sign of the transition from church to government responsibility for relief. Between 1350 and 1530, a series of regulations known as the "Statutes of Labourers" were enacted in England, with the goal of forcing the impoverished to work. The decline of the church's influence and the growing trend to delegate duty to government authorities prompted a series of actions in England, culminating in the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601.

Also read -   THE STATE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION: ITS FUNCTION AND INFLUENCE ON OTHER INSTITUTIONS

The law distinguished three classes of the poor

• The able-bodied poor were referred to as "sturdy beggars" and made to work in a correctional facility or workhouse. Those who refused to work at the correctional facility were either thrown in the stocks or imprisoned. 
• The impotent poor were persons who were unable to work, such as the sick, elderly, blind, deaf-mute, lame, insane, and mothers with small children. They were sent to the almshouse, where they were expected to assist to the best of their abilities. They were provided "outside relief" in the form of food, clothing, and fuel if they had a place to reside. 
• Orphans and children who had been abandoned by their parents or whose parents were too destitute to raise them were considered dependent children. Children aged eight and up who were capable of doing some household and other work were indentured to a townsman.

For the next 300 years, the Poor Law of 1601 set the standard for public aid under government control in Great Britain. It established the notion that the parish, as the local community, was responsible for organising and funding poor relief for the parish's citizens. The poor overseers were in charge of enforcing the poor legislation in the parish. Their job was to take the impoverished person's application for relief, research his or her situation, and determine whether he or she was eligible for assistance.

• The notion of the state’s obligation for assistance is unanimously acknowledged and has never been substantially questioned. It is in line with democratic thinking as well as with the principle of the separation of church and state. 
• The notion of municipal responsibility for welfare enunciated in the Poor Law stretches back to 1388 and is aimed to deter vagrancy. It stipulates that “sturdy beggars” to return to their birthplaces and there seek relief. 
• A third principle specified differential treatment of persons according to categories: the deserving as against the undeserving poor, children, the aged, and the sick. This idea is founded on the theory that certain categories of unhappy persons have a grater claim on the community than other types. 
• The Poor Law also outlined familial responsibilities for aiding dependants. Children, grandkids, parents, and grandparents were defined as “legally liable” relations.

The Elizabethan Poor Law was noteworthy and progressive when it was enacted. It has served as the basis for both English and American public welfare.

The Poor Law Revisions: 1834-1909

In 1834 a Parliamentary Commission presented a report which aimed to revise the Elizabethan and post Elizabethan Poor Laws. Upon the basis of the committee’s report legislation was enacted enunciating the following principles: (a) doctrine of least eligibility, (b) re-establishment of the workhouse test, and (c) centralization of control. 

The doctrine of least eligibility said that a pauper's situation should never be considered more eligible than that of a person from the lowest social class who subsists on the results of their own labour. In other words, no one who received assistance was expected to be in the same financial situation. The able-bodied poor might ask for assistance in the public workhouse under the second principle, but unwillingness to accept the workhouse's accommodation and fare disqualified them from receiving any aid. The amount of outdoor relief was kept to a bare minimum. The third premise stated that a central authority made up of three Poverty Law Commissioners had the authority to integrate and coordinate poor law services across the country. The administrative units would no longer be parishes.

There were significant modifications in Poor Law legislation between 1834 and 1909, with the cumulative effect of veering the entire system away from the ideas of 1834. Changes that began to provide specialised treatment for specific disadvantaged groups were the most significant. For example, district schools and foster homes were established for dependent children, and specialised institutions for the crazy and feeble-minded were established.

The Poor Law Report of 1909 takes a more positive approach to the poor laws. Instead of repression, the report emphasised therapeutic treatment and rehabilitation, as well as universal provision in place of the selective workhouse test. If the principles of 1834 served as a "foundation of repression," the principles of 1909 may be described as a "structure of prevention."

The chairman of the Interdepartmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, Sir William Beveridge, submitted the Committee's Report to the government in 1942. Four important principles were stressed in the report:

• Every citizen to be covered, 
• The major risks of loss of earning power -- sickness, unemployment, accident, old age, widowhood, maternity-- to be included in a single insurance, 
• A flat rate of contribution to be paid regardless of the contributor’s income, and 
• A flat rate of benefit to be paid, also without regard to income, as a right to all who qualify.

Beveridge emphasised that the plan's underpinning social concept was to protect the British from hunger and other social ills. Everyone is eligible for benefits such as maternity, sickness, unemployment, industrial injury, retirement, and a widow's allowance. Family Allowances, National Health Services, and National Assistance are all connected services.

The Beveridge Report of 1942 joins 601, 1834, 1909, and 1942 as one of the great documents in English Poor Law history. The report laid the groundwork for modern social welfare policy in the United Kingdom.

Beginnings of the COS Movement and Settlement House Movement

In 1869, a group of public-spirited persons in England created the London Charity Organization Society to address the problem of competing and overlapping social services in London, which had been growing over the years (COS). Two of the founders were Octavia Hill and Samuel Barnett. Octavia Hill created a technique of "friendly rent collecting" as a method of rehabilitating slum homes in her work as a housing reformer.

Through weekly meetings and 'Letters to Fellow Workers,' Octavia Hill imparted to the volunteers specific principles or laws to be observed in their operations. 'Each case and situation must be tailored to the individual,' she said. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for their privacy and independence. She cautioned her employees against judging the tenants based on their own personal standards. She believed that even the most degraded of her tenants deserved dignity.

Toynbee Hall was founded by Samuel Augustus Barnett, the first settlement house, where wealthy Oxford students "settled" in an attempt to ameliorate living conditions in Whitechapel's slums. The primary concept was to bring educated people together with the impoverished for mutual gain. The Christian Socialists have realised that simply distributing charity does not alleviate issues. It was necessary to live with the poor and listen to their issues in order to gain a deeper understanding of the situation of poverty and underdevelopment.

We've seen how social work evolved from the Church's charity focus to the role of the state in public welfare. The movements and organisations that began in the United Kingdom.

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Judge Dismisses Classified Documents Case Against Trump

Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that the entire case should be thrown out because the appointment of the special counsel who brought the case, Jack Smith, had violated the Constitution. He indicated he planned to appeal.

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Alan Feuer covers the federal cases against former President Donald J. Trump.

Judge dismisses classified documents case against Trump.

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case threw out all of the charges against him on Monday, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been given his job in violation of the Constitution.

In a stunning decision delivered on the first day of the Republican National Convention, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, found that Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel was improper because it was not based on a specific federal statute and because he had not been named to the post by the president or confirmed by the Senate.

She also found that Mr. Smith had been improperly funded by the Treasury Department.

The ruling by Judge Cannon, who was put on the bench by Mr. Trump in his final year in office, flew in the face of previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate era that upheld the legality of the ways in which independent prosecutors have been put into their posts.

It handed Mr. Trump a major legal victory two days after he was wounded in a shooting at a campaign rally and at the very onset of the political pageant where he is set to formally become his party’s presidential nominee.

The classified documents case, which is being heard in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., once appeared to be the most straightforward of the four criminal prosecutions that Mr. Trump has faced. He was charged last year with illegally holding on to classified national security materials after leaving office and then obstructing government efforts to retrieve them along with two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos DeOliveira.

The charges against Mr. Nauta and Mr. DeOliveira were also tossed out. Mr. Smith’s office said he intended to appeal.

“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the attorney general is statutorily authorized to appoint a special counsel,” said Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel. “The Justice Department has authorized the special counsel to appeal the court’s order.”

But even if the appeal succeeds, the case still might never go in front of a jury.

It has long been clear that the documents case would not go to trial before the election in November, largely because of the glacial pace with which Judge Cannon has handled it. Should Mr. Trump be elected president again, he could simply have his Justice Department dismiss the case if it is reinstated on appeal — and even if he does not, longstanding Justice Department policy forbids prosecuting a sitting president.

But Judge Cannon’s decision to dismiss the indictment in its entirety at such a consequential moment in Mr. Trump’s campaign was nonetheless a remarkable development for the former president’s legal and political future, giving him further ammunition to portray the prosecution as an effort by President Biden and his allies to undercut him in the election.

In a statement on his social media platform, Mr. Trump said the decision dismissed what he described as a “Lawless Indictment.”

He wrote that the decision should be followed “quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts,” referring to the three other criminal indictments filed against him last year, as well as civil cases he has faced.

In her 93-page order — by far the longest she has written in more than a year of handling the documents case — Judge Cannon offered an in-depth look at her legal reasons for tossing out the charges. At the heart of her thinking was an assertion that no specific federal statute authorized the appointment of special counsels like Mr. Smith or gave them the “prosecutorial power” that they have wielded for 25 years.

Special counsels are currently governed by Justice Department regulations traditionally believed to have been based on a series of federal laws laying out the structure of the department and the powers of the attorney general. That has been the practice since 1999 when Congress allowed the Independent Counsel Act, which authorized and governed a different type of independent prosecutor, to lapse in the wake of the Whitewater investigation into President Bill Clinton.

But Judge Cannon took a wrecking ball to all of that, ruling that none of the statutes governing the conduct of attorneys general actually gave them the authority to appoint special prosecutors like Mr. Smith.

Moreover, she declared that allowing special counsels to operate under the control of the attorney general was a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers. And she invited Congress to pass a new law if legislators wanted Mr. Smith to keep pursuing the case against Mr. Trump.

“If the political branches wish to grant the attorney general power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney,” she wrote, “there is a valid means by which to do so.”

When the Independent Counsel Act was permitted to expire and was replaced by internal Justice Department regulations, there was a consensus in Washington that special prosecutors needed to be independent enough to handle sensitive political investigations without undue influence from powerful politicians, but not so independent that they would run amok and abuse their power.

In her ruling, Judge Cannon clearly sided with those who feared that special counsels like Mr. Smith were unchecked by sufficient accountability to the attorney general.

“The special counsel regulations impose almost no supervision or direction over the special counsel and give him broad power to render final decisions on behalf of the United States,” she wrote.

In their initial motion concerning Mr. Smith’s appointment, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had asked Judge Cannon to consider the related issue of whether the special counsel’s office had been improperly funded in violation of the Constitution’s appropriations clause.

The judge appeared to agree with that argument as well, writing that Mr. Smith had been “drawing funds from the Treasury without statutory authorization” and that “there is good reason to believe that the Appropriation Clause violation serves as a separate, independent basis to dismiss.”

Her decision to dismiss the case came two weeks after Justice Clarence Thomas expressed his own doubts about how Mr. Smith got his job in a brief concurrence to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling granting Mr. Trump broad immunity against criminal prosecution.

The concurrence was unusual given that the question of Mr. Smith’s appointment was not under consideration by the court at the time and in fact was never raised in the case underlying the immunity ruling. That ruling stemmed from Mr. Trump’s other federal indictment — the one in Washington in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

Justice Thomas never mentioned Judge Cannon or the classified documents case in his concurrence. But he did recommend that “lower courts” look into the “essential questions concerning the special counsel’s appointment.” Last month, Judge Cannon did precisely that, holding two days of hearings in Fort Pierce on the issue of Mr. Smith’s appointment and funding.

The hearings were unusual, not the least because they covered in great detail what seemed to be settled legal ground.

Reaching back to the early 1970s, federal courts have repeatedly rejected efforts to question the legality of independent prosecutors like Mr. Smith. Those have included the Supreme Court upholding the appointment of Leon Jaworski, one of the special prosecutors who investigated the Watergate scandal, in a decision that was largely focused on the issue of President Richard M. Nixon’s claims of executive privilege.

Judges have also tossed out efforts to invalidate the work of special counsels like Robert S. Mueller III, who examined connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.

In her ruling, however, Judge Cannon said that it was a “mistaken premise” to view Mr. Smith as “just another in a long line of ‘special attorneys’ of similar ilk.” She asserted that he was different from his predecessors for having come to the job as a private citizen and because he operated with “very little oversight or supervision.”

“In the end, there does appear to be a ‘tradition’ of appointing special-attorney-like figures in moments of political scandal throughout the country’s history,” she wrote. “But very few, if any, of these figures actually resemble the position of Special Counsel Smith."

The decision to kill the classified documents case, and the hearing that preceded it, were hardly the first unorthodox moves Judge Cannon has made since she first took control of the case last June.

Over and over, she has issued rulings and taken procedural steps that have prompted second-guessing and criticism among legal scholars, many of whom have pointed out that she has been on the bench for less than four years and has limited experience in overseeing criminal trials.

She has often shown a willingness to grant a serious audience to some of Mr. Trump’s most far-fetched defense claims. And her penchant for scheduling hearings to consider questions that many federal judges would have dealt with on the merits of written filings alone has played into Mr. Trump’s strategy of seeking to delay the case for as long as possible.

Her decision about Mr. Smith’s appointment was also striking for the way in which it seemed to shut down any efforts by prosecutors to fight it outside of an appeal to a higher court.

Judge Cannon, for instance, appeared to foreclose the idea of Mr. Smith asking to file additional papers or to request that the issue be reheard. She noted that prosecutors had already been afforded a “full and fair opportunity to brief the matter.”

And she ended her ruling in a way that left no doubt about her intentions to end the prosecution.

“The Clerk is directed to CLOSE this case,” she wrote. “Any scheduled hearings are CANCELED. Any pending motions are DENIED AS MOOT, and any pending deadlines are TERMINATED.”

But she will not have the final word. Mr. Smith’s appeal will go initially to the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

A three-judge panel from that court handed Judge Cannon a stern rebuke nearly two years ago, reversing a decision she made that favored Mr. Trump shortly after the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.

What is the appointments clause of the Constitution?

The ruling on Monday dismissing the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump cited a relatively obscure sentence in the Constitution concerning the appointment of officials by the executive branch.

The section, called the appointments clause, says that the president and the leaders of federal government departments can appoint certain officials, called inferior officers, without the consent of the Senate — if Congress has offered the executive branch such appointment powers through a law. Special counsels have been considered to be inferior officers. They have the same powers as a U.S. attorney, which is a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed position.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida found that no corresponding law existed to authorize the Justice Department’s appointment of the special counsel in the documents case, Jack Smith.

She wrote that the appointment of Mr. Smith by President Biden’s attorney general “effectively usurps” a power vested in Congress.

Judge Cannon, who was elevated to the federal bench by Mr. Trump in 2020, said Mr. Smith’s appointment required either a confirmation by federal lawmakers or the enactment of a broader law giving the Justice Department the power to make such an appointment.

In issuing her ruling, the judge defied a long history of attorneys general appointing independent counsels.

The Supreme Court has consistently acted as though special prosecutors are legally appointed, said Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Georgetown University . “This is a really idiosyncratic view that Cannon has,” he said.

In a 1974 Supreme Court decision upholding a subpoena from the special prosecutor in the Watergate inquiry, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote that “Congress has vested in the Attorney General the power to conduct the criminal litigation of the United States Government.”

But Judge Cannon held that the decision did not support the appointment of Mr. Smith, writing that the Supreme Court had “assumed without deciding” that the attorney general had the power to appoint the Watergate case special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski.

In appointing Mr. Smith, the Justice Department had cited sections of the federal legal code that it said authorized the creation of the special counsel. But Judge Cannon found that those sections did not authorize the appointment.

Professor Chafetz said the ruling could be seen as less a constitutional opinion than a statutory one, because it hinged in part on Judge Cannon’s analysis of sections of the statutory code.

“Everybody agrees that there needs to be a statutory authority to appoint Smith,” he said. “The question is just whether there is that statutory authority.”

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the office of the special counsel, said the office planned to appeal the ruling.

“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue,” Mr. Carr said in a statement.

Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, said he thought the decision would “most likely” be reversed, arguing in an interview that sections of the statutory code “clearly” empower the attorney general to appoint a special counsel.

But he added that the ruling would have sweeping implications “unless it is reversed.”

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

Read the Ruling That Dismisses the Documents Case Against Trump

Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that the classified documents case against former president Donald J. Trump should be thrown out because the appointment of the special counsel violated the Constitution.

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Eileen Sullivan

A spokesman for the Office of the Special Counsel, Peter Carr, issued a statement on Judge Cannon’s decision and the special counsel plans to appeal it: “The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel. The Justice Department has authorized the Special Counsel to appeal the court’s order.”

Alan Feuer and Eileen Sullivan

Alan Feuer and Eileen Sullivan have regularly covered the proceedings in Judge Cannon’s courtroom.

Dismissal brings new scrutiny to judge with a history of unorthodox decisions.

Even before her bombshell decision on Monday to dismiss former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, Judge Aileen M. Cannon had made any number of unorthodox rulings.

In fact, since Judge Cannon took control of the case in June 2023 , many of her decisions have been so outside the norm that they have fueled intense criticism of her legal acumen, stoked questions about favoritism toward Mr. Trump and slowed the documents case sufficiently that it would not come to trial before Election Day.

Still, almost no one, including some defense lawyers working on the case, expected Judge Cannon to throw out the charges against Mr. Trump by ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been unconstitutionally appointed to his job — especially on the first day of the Republican National Convention.

The ruling upended 25 years of Justice Department procedure for naming and governing special counsels and called into question decisions by previous courts reaching back to the Watergate era.

“The very definition of an activist judge, she has single-handedly upended three decades of established law historically used fairly and in a bipartisan manner,” said Joëlle Anne Moreno, a law professor at Florida International University.

From the moment that Judge Cannon was assigned to the case, there were questions about her ability to handle it. She took control of one of the most significant prosecutions in American history, rife with legal and political complexities, even though she had been a judge for less than four years and had extremely limited experience in overseeing criminal trials.

On top of all that, the main defendant was the president who had nominated her to the federal bench.

Her colleagues in the Southern District of Florida were concerned enough about her stewardship of the case that not just one, but two of them approached her early in her tenure and asked her to consider stepping back and handing off the matter to another federal judge.

One of the jurists — the chief judge of the district — suggested it would be inappropriate for Judge Cannon to continue on the case because of a ruling she had made in Mr. Trump’s favor in a related civil case after the F.B.I. had searched Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club and residence in Florida, in August 2022.

In a move that drew national scrutiny and criticism, Judge Cannon intervened in the civil case and barred the Justice Department from using any of the documents that agents seized from Mar-a-Lago in their inquiry until an independent arbiter had sorted through them for any that were privileged.

That decision was quickly reversed in a stinging ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which said she never had legal authority to get involved in the first place.

Over and over, throughout her handling of the documents case in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon has made similarly unusual decisions, often showing a willingness to grant a serious audience to some of the former president’s most far-fetched defense claims.

She has also repeatedly scheduled hearings in court to debate issues that many federal judges would have dealt with on the merits of written filings alone. And that has made it all but certain that the case will not reach a jury until well after the election in November — one of Mr. Trump’s overarching legal and political objectives.

Many legal experts questioned Judge Cannon’s decision to hold a hearing last month on the issue of Mr. Smith’s appointment, arguing that several courts reaching back to the Watergate era had already upheld the legality of independent prosecutors.

The hearing was even odder, the experts pointed out, because the judge allowed outside parties who had filed friend-of-the-court briefs to address her directly for up to 30 minutes — a practice that rarely takes place at the trial level and is more common in appellate-level courts like the Supreme Court.

Entertaining direct arguments from these outside parties was a signal that she was taking Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss on the appointments question seriously, Joel S. Johnson, an associate professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, said last month before the hearing.

Judge Cannon has her defenders. She approached the question of the constitutionality of the special counsel appointment with the thorough preparation of a circuit judge, said Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who argued against the legality of the special counsel before her at the hearing last month.

“I’ve rarely seen a district court judge this well prepared,” Mr. Blackman said. “She knew the cases, she knew the statutes and I suspect she had already written most of that opinion already.”

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section, said that even though Judge Cannon’s ruling on Monday was unusual and rejected by other judges, it is also defensible in the context of recent Supreme Court decisions.

He cited the court’s decision granting Mr. Trump substantial immunity for actions he took in office and other decisions as “legal doctrine that upsets settled principles on separations of power and presidential accountability.” In a concurring opinion in the immunity decision, Justice Clarence Thomas had called for re-examining the legality of the appointment of special counsels.

But the hearing and decision on Mr. Smith’s appointment were hardly the only unusual moves by Judge Cannon.

In one of the more striking aspects of her handling of the case, Judge Cannon has ignored a common practice in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits, of trial judges passing off routine motions to the magistrate judge attached to a case.

Judge Cannon has not delegated any motions to the magistrate judge in this case, Bruce E. Reinhart. And Judge Reinhart knows the case well: He approved the search warrant used by the F.B.I. two years ago when agents descended on Mar-a-Lago and hauled away a trove of classified material that is central to the case.

This spring, in another unusual move, Judge Cannon ordered the defense and the prosecution to write dueling instructions for the jury that seemed to take for granted one of Mr. Trump’s most far-fetched defense claims: that he could not be tried for holding on to a trove of classified documents because he had designated the materials in question to be his own personal property under a law known as the Presidential Records Act.

By appearing to adopt the former president’s contentious position on the act, Judge Cannon seemed to be nudging any eventual jurors toward acquitting Mr. Trump or even leaving open the possibility that she herself could acquit the former president near the end of the proceeding by declaring that the government had failed to prove its case.

“I have never seen a case where one would contemplate giving the jury alternative instructions: ‘Decide the case on this hypothetical scenario and then answer the question in an alternative understanding of the law,’” said Margaret Kwoka, a professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Judge Cannon has rarely issued rulings in the documents case that have been longer than 15 or 20 pages, and has often made decisions without revealing much about her legal reasoning.

But her order on Monday dismissing the case because of Mr. Smith’s appointment was 93 pages and full of a sweeping tour of historical events reaching back through the Watergate affair to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s.

“It’s significant that this 90-plus-page decision is more erudite with more traditional citations than some of Judge Cannon’s other opinions,” said Mr. Butler, the former federal prosecutor.

Frustrations with Judge Cannon have been mounting for months among members of Mr. Smith’s team, including one of his top deputies, David Harbach, who has twice lost his temper with the judge during hearings in her courtroom.

It is likely that prosecutors will appeal this ruling in particular to the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which issued the rebuke against Judge Cannon two years ago over her decision about a special master.

Alan Morrison, a professor at George Washington Law School, said the order to dismiss the case on Monday may end up having a positive outcome for Mr. Smith.

“He can now take an appeal and when he prevails, he can ask the court to reassign the case to another judge,” Mr. Morrison said.

“Of course, it was clear a long time ago that she would never allow the case to be tried before Election Day — if ever,” Mr. Morrison added. “And so this order does nothing to impact the trial date adversely, in the real world.”

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, called Judge Cannon’s decision misguided, citing the decades of examples of attorneys general appointing independent counsels. Mr. Raskin was the lead impeachment manager in Trump’s impeachment trial over his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. “Former President Trump’s actions require accountability — not the overthrowing of the special counsel on dubious constitutional grounds,” Mr. Raskin said.

For additional context, Trump filed his motion to dismiss the documents case based on the constitutionality of the appointment of the special counsel on Feb. 22. Judge Cannon did not hold a hearing on the motion until June 21. Trump’s defense team has filed nine other motions to dismiss for other reasons. Before Monday, she had ruled on only four of them. Critics have pointed to the slow pace of decisions as evidence that she was deliberately trying to prevent the case from going to trial before the election.

Michael Waldman, a constitutional lawyer and president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said Judge Cannon “handled this case like an eager member of Donald Trump’s defense team.” He cited her slow pace in making routine pretrial decisions and her patience for hearing “somewhat outlandish legal arguments” without ever resolving some of them. Monday’s decision, however, he said, “goes beyond what she’s done before.”

Michael Levenson

The government repeatedly tried to get former President Donald J. Trump to return classified documents before he was charged with mishandling the material and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim it. Many legal experts believed the case was the strongest of the four against him. But on Monday, a federal judge dismissed the case. Here’s a timeline of the nearly four-year fight over the sensitive documents.

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section, said that even though Judge Cannon’s ruling on Monday was unusual and rejected by other judges, it is also defensible in the context of recent Supreme Court decisions. He cited the court’s decision on presidential immunity, among others.

Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who argued against the legality of the special counsel before Judge Cannon last month, welcomed the outcome, noting that she had been thorough in issuing her decision. “She walked through every single argument raised by the parties, by the special counsel, by the amicus briefs. And she went through all of them,” he said.

Charlie Savage

Reporting from Washington

Judge Cannon’s ruling rejects precedents from courts far above her own.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon cut against decades of decisions by higher courts in declaring on Monday that the appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel was illegitimate , throwing out the indictment against former President Donald J. Trump in the classified documents case.

A Trump appointee at the U.S. District Court in South Florida, Judge Cannon had previously shocked legal experts by intervening in his favor during the investigation — only to be reversed in two scathing rulings by a conservative appeals court.

The question now is whether the appeals court will rule that she got the law wrong — again erring in Mr. Trump’s favor — and whether Mr. Smith, when he appeals the decision, will also gamble on asking for the case to be reassigned to another judge.

“This is a very aggressive move on her part,” said Akhil R. Amar, a Yale Law School professor, who said he would not be surprised if she is overturned.

“She’s already been smacked down a couple of times,” he added. “On the other hand, depending on who the panel is, they might say — judges aren’t always the most courageous people in the world — ‘Trump’s going to be president and do we want to take him on?’”

Judge Cannon’s decision upended what had appeared to be settled law, not only dismissing the documents case but also starting a legal battle that could threaten the federal election subversion case against Mr. Trump — and undermine the system for semi-independent investigations of politically powerful people.

She also objected to the Justice Department’s mechanism for funding Mr. Smith’s office. But her main complaint centered on whether he was legally appointed to start.

While Mr. Smith is a former Justice Department prosecutor, he was working for an international court in Europe when Attorney General Merrick B. Garland asked him to handle criminal inquiries into Mr. Trump as special counsel — a prosecutor appointed to supervise a particularly sensitive matter and who wields the powers of a U.S. attorney with a degree of autonomy.

Mr. Smith is also overseeing the federal election subversion indictment against Mr. Trump. When the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority this month bestowed some immunity on Mr. Trump in that case, Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion, questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Smith’s appointment.

No other justice joined his opinion, but the matter is all but certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court. Still, if Mr. Trump wins in November and the issue is still pending, he could use his powers to withdraw the appeal and shut down the case.

Other special prosecutors have been appointed from outside the government, including Leon Jaworski in the Watergate scandal, Lawrence E. Walsh in the Iran-contra affair and Robert S. Mueller III in the inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Courts nevertheless consistently said their appointments were lawful.

In striking down Mr. Smith’s appointment, Judge Cannon argued that the Supreme Court’s acceptance of Mr. Jaworski’s appointment was unpersuasive and should not be seen as binding. She also rejected appeals court rulings upholding the appointments of Mr. Walsh and Mr. Mueller because they relied upon the Watergate decision without fresh legal analysis.

Under the Constitution, senior officials in the executive branch who exercise significant authority are called “officers.” There are two types. “Principal” officers must be presidentially appointed and confirmed by the Senate. “Inferior” officers, still senior, but more subordinate, generally must be, too, unless Congress passes a law giving a department head the power to appoint them unilaterally.

The Justice Department has taken the position that special counsels are “inferior” officers — a view that Judge Cannon accepted for the purpose of her analysis, although she expressed some doubts, given the sweep of that position’s authority. But she rejected the argument that Congress had given attorneys general the power to appoint them.

The department cited various statutes in which lawmakers have said, among other things, that attorneys general are empowered to appoint officials “to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States ,” and that they may assign any attorney they have specially appointed” under law to “ conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal .”

But Judge Cannon said those laws did not authorize the appointment of a special prosecutor who came from outside the government. Others, she noted, have been sitting U.S. attorneys who were Senate-confirmed presidential appointees when they were selected to oversee particularly sensitive cases.

Her decision contradicted what the Supreme Court said in a landmark ruling in 1974 in upholding a subpoena by Mr. Jaworski seeking President Richard M. Nixon’s Oval Office tapes during the Watergate scandal. While a former Justice Department official, Mr. Jaworski was in private practice when the acting attorney general, Robert H. Bork, appointed him to take over the case.

In a unanimous ruling , Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, a Nixon appointee, cited those statutes in broaching Mr. Jaworski’s appointment.

Congress had vested in the attorney general both the “power to conduct the criminal litigation of the United States government” and “the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties,” the chief justice wrote.

The attorney general, he added, “acting pursuant to those statutes,” had delegated prosecutorial authority to Mr. Jaworski, including the power to contest Nixon’s invocation of executive privilege over the Watergate tapes.

The Justice Department — and appeals courts in other cases — has taken that passage as binding law that settles whether Congress has empowered attorneys general to appoint special prosecutors.

But Judge Cannon insisted that the passage was so-called dicta — stray or passing remarks in a judicial opinion that were tangential to the issues at hand and so do not count as binding law. She noted that Nixon had not contested the validity of Mr. Jaworski’s appointment.

“The issue of the attorney general’s appointment authority was not raised, briefed, argued or disputed before the Nixon court,” she wrote.

Other judges have interpreted the significance of the Supreme Court’s treatment of Mr. Jaworski’s appointment differently.

In 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a challenge to the authority of Mr. Walsh , the independent counsel for the Iran-contra investigation. Mr. Walsh, a former federal judge and senior Justice Department official in the Eisenhower administration, had been a lawyer in private practice at the time of his appointment.

(Congress established the position of “independent counsel” in a 1978 law that lapsed in 1999. Since 1999, a Justice Department regulation has enabled the position of “special counsel.” Both the lapsed law and the regulation say the special prosecutor should come from outside the government, although attorneys general have sometimes sidestepped that part.)

Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel in the Iran-contra case, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee, said the appeals court had “no difficulty concluding that the attorney general possessed the statutory authority to create the Office of Independent Counsel.”

He cited cases dating back to 1954 that showed that an officer may delegate his or her authority to an inferior officer, and said the statutes in which Congress had granted various powers to attorneys general implicitly authorized them to create an Office of Independent Counsel.

In rejecting Judge Ginsburg’s conclusion, Judge Cannon stressed that the appeals court had looked to the passage in the Nixon tapes case she viewed as not binding, observing that, “No analysis of the statutes was provided.”

She also noted that Judge Ginsburg, in a footnote, had said the Supreme Court “presupposed the validity of a regulation appointing the special prosecutor.”

Similarly in 2019, the D.C. Circuit rejected a challenge to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III , the special counsel investigating ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia at the time of Moscow’s covert operation to help Mr. Trump win. While Mr. Mueller was a former Justice Department official and F.B.I. director, he was retired at the time of his appointment.

The D.C. Circuit panel made clear that it considered the language in the Nixon case as binding precedent, citing the Supreme Court’s 1974 ruling as settling the matter. Judge Cannon noted that this meant the panel did not reanalyze the statutes for itself.

Still, in that case, the plaintiff had argued — as Judge Cannon did on Monday — that the Nixon case language was merely a stray remark because the issue had not been directly presented and analyzed.

But in the Mueller case, the appeals court rejected that claim as unpersuasive. The panel wrote that the attorney general’s statutory authority to delegate responsibility to Mr. Jaworski — “was necessary to the decision that a justiciable controversy existed.”

It added, “The Supreme Court’s quoted statement regarding the attorney general’s power to appoint subordinate officers is, therefore, not dictum.”

In granting Mr. Trump’s request to dismiss his indictment, Judge Cannon once again went in her own direction.

As Republicans hailed the decision, at least one Democrat called for the judge to be removed from the case.

Donald J. Trump and top Republicans celebrated after a federal judge dismissed the classified documents case against the former president in a shocking ruling on Monday, while at least one leading Democrat called for the judge to be removed from the case.

The decision, which is expected to be appealed, arrived on the first day of the Republican National Convention and as the country still reeled from an assassination attempt against Mr. Trump over the weekend.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a conservative jurist who was elevated to the federal bench by Mr. Trump in 2020, ruled that the special counsel prosecuting the documents case, Jack Smith, had been improperly appointed by the Justice Department.

In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump asserted that the decision, which rejected the reasoning of decades of federal court decisions, amounted to the dismissal of a “Lawless Indictment.”

Mr. Trump wrote that the decision should be followed “quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts,” referring to the three other criminal indictments filed against him last year, as well as civil cases he has faced. He cited the need to “move forward in Uniting our Nation” after the assassination attempt.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, urged President Biden to order Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to dismiss the federal cases against the former president. Mr. Biden has not publicly weighed in on the dismissal.

Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who is closely aligned with Mr. Trump, lavished praise on the judge who made the unorthodox ruling, saying in a statement that the opinion had displayed “courage and wisdom.”

“Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice tried to shred the Constitution with the appointment of their so called ‘special counsel’ Jack Smith as part of their desperate illegal lawfare campaign against President Trump,” Ms. Stefanik added.

At the same time, Democrats and liberal legal scholars excoriated the ruling.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in a statement that the decision was “breathtakingly misguided,” declaring that “Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned.”

Judge Cannon, who sits on the bench in the Southern District of Florida, had previously delayed the proceeding. Even before Monday, it was all but certain that the case would not go to trial before the election in November.

Representative Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who served as lead counsel for his party in the first Trump impeachment trial, said in a statement that the ruling ran roughshod over precedent and “common sense.”

“Judge Cannon is no doubt well aware that the Supreme Court has upheld special counsel appointments time and time again,” Mr. Goldman said in the statement, adding that the decision was the “stuff of a banana republic, not a democracy.”

Trump’s case put the judge, Aileen Cannon, under a spotlight.

When former President Donald J. Trump appointed Aileen M. Cannon to serve as a judge in the Southern District of Florida, very few people knew who she was.

But that changed when she was randomly assigned an unprecedented case involving a former president — the same president who appointed her.

Judge Cannon grew up in Miami with a Cuban mother and American father. She attended Duke University and the University of Michigan Law School, which is when she joined the conservative Federalist Society and went on to clerk for a conservative appeals court judge. She then worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida, most often writing appellate motions. She is married with two children.

In 2020, someone from the office of Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, asked her to apply to be a potential federal judge. And in November 2020, she became one of the youngest judges on the bench in the Southern District of Florida. Though some senators raised questions about the depth of her experience, she was confirmed in a 56-21 vote.

Before she was assigned Mr. Trump’s case, she had little experience with criminal trials. Her impartiality came into question with an early decision she made in the case, insisting that an independent mediator should review the thousands of documents the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized in 2022 from Mr. Trump’s private residence and club in Palm Beach, Fla. That review would have placed the case on hold for months. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned her decision in a swift rebuke .

Since then, questions have swirled about her qualifications to oversee such a high-profile case. In June 2023, she rejected suggestions from two other more senior judges in the district to step aside.

Judge Cannon told senators that she joined the Federalist Society in law school because she enjoyed the “diversity of legal viewpoints” discussed at the group’s meetings and events.

“I also found interesting the organization’s discussions about the constitutional separation of powers, the rule of law and the limited role of the judiciary to say what the law is — not to make the law,” she said in written answers to senators’ questions during her confirmation process.

She is one of four Republican-appointed district judges in Florida who have accepted trips paid for by the Antonin Scalia School of Law, according to financial disclosures through 2022.

Judge Cannon disclosed she attended two conferences in Pray, Montana, paid for by the school. Judges Rodney Smith, Rodolfo Ruiz and Donald Graham also attended one of those years.

Glenn Thrush

Justice Department officials have no immediate plans to seek Cannon’s removal from the case, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Maggie Haberman

Trump is already sending messages to his campaign email list about the dismissal. There is an effort from anti-Trump critics on social media to suggest the decision is not a major development. It may get overturned on appeal, and the case was already grinding slowly, but it’s a dramatic development that even some in Trump’s orbit were surprised by, and it is objectively a significant moment.

Even as other district judges rejected the Trump team’s argument about the legality of the special counsel's appointment and many constitutional scholars believed it was a long shot, Judge Cannon’s willingness to hold hearings on the argument was a signal that she was seriously considering the constitutional argument.

Cannon based her dismissal of the Florida case on the fact that no statute explicitly authorized the appointment or funding of Jack Smith and his deputies. By contrast, the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden, David Weiss, is also the U.S. attorney for Delaware — a Senate-confirmed post. That could make any challenge to the Weiss appointment more difficult, John Fishwick, a former U.S. attorney from Virginia, told me.

Attorney General Merrick Garland — faced with investigations into Trump, President Biden and Hunter Biden — has used the special counsel regulation as much as any of his predecessors to provide political cover and insulate the department. It seems likely, though not guaranteed, he will appeal Cannon’s decision. But as of yet the department has declined to comment.

The sweep of Cannon’s decision was a surprise at the Justice Department. The outcome was not. Jack Smith’s team saw the Trump documents case as essentially stalled out for months because of Cannon’s slow pace and had more or less written off the possibility of a trial this year.

Prosectors and Justice Department officials — who had spent the weekend working on the assassination investigation — scrapped their morning schedules to assess the impact of Cannon’s ruling on a range of cases, including Hunter Biden’s looming trial in tax charges in California. Smith’s spokesman said they were not prepared to comment immediately.

Benjamin Protess

My colleagues have written a lot about Judge Cannon’s slow pace, unusual rulings and apparent sympathy for Trump, who appointed her in his final days in office. Today’s ruling will provide her critics more fodder to question both her independence and her abilities.

It’s worth recalling that the classified documents case — in which Trump stands accused of illegally holding on to a trove of some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets — was once considered to be the most straightforward of the four criminal cases he has faced. Judge Cannon has now essentially erased it — unless prosecutors can have the indictment reinstated on appeal.

Speaking of an appeal: Prosecutors in Smith’s office have for months been amassing a dossier of what they believe are bad decisions by Judge Cannon. It’s possible —although not yet clear — that along with asking the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to reverse her decision dismissing the documents case, they might also ask the appellate judges to consider removing her from it altogether.

Looking back, Judge Cannon signaled her interest in the issue of Smith’s appointment by holding a hearing last month on the question in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla. The hearing was unusual not only because the issue seemed to have been settled by several previous court decisions, but also because Judge Cannon allowed outside parties who filed friend of the court briefs to address her directly for 30 minutes each during the hearing. That kind of thing almost never happens at the trial court level and is far more common in appellate courts like the Supreme Court.

The documents case in Florida appeared to be one of the strongest criminal cases that Trump was facing. It was based in part on testimony from one of Trump’s former lawyers, who recounted how the former president suggested they hide evidence from investigators. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump said, according to his lawyer.

Richard Fausset

The ruling should have “zero effect” on the indictment of Trump in Georgia, said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University. Kreis noted that questions about the appointments clause of the Constitution have no bearing on the Atlanta-based case, which is being prosecuted by Fani T. Willis, the elected district attorney of Fulton County, Ga. But the importance of the Georgia case is now elevated, Kreis said, given the fact that the two federal criminal cases could now be thrown into disarray.

Trump has been saying he is redrafting Thursday's nomination speech to have a different tone after the attempt on his life this past weekend. But if he doesn’t reference the dismissed case, it is hard to imagine that others in their speeches will not.

Judge Cannon’s ruling has no impact on Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan, which was brought by a local district attorney, not a special counsel. However, Trump is seeking to have his Manhattan conviction thrown out for separate reasons related to the recent Supreme Court decision granting him immunity from prosecution for official actions he took as president.

Trump had suggested in an interview with the New York Post after the assassination attempt that “we hear” the Justice Department might be preparing to drop the federal indictments against him. That is not what happened here.

For those wondering how Judge Cannon’s decision will affect Trump’s other federal case — the one in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election — the short answer is: Let’s wait and see . Trump’s lawyers in the election interference case will no doubt seek to use her ruling to kill that indictment, too. But Smith’s team will surely appeal the ruling, setting up a showdown in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. And the cases may run on separate tracks for a while until the Supreme Court renders its own decision on the issue.