LIVE: White House Counsel Will Scharf Speaks in Fireside Chat at Federalist Society 2026 Lawyers Convention

I'd like to introduce another Harvard FedSoc president. Will Scharf currently serves as the White House Counsel. Mr. Scharf previously served as staff secretary to President Trump, as well as in the US Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy, and is an assistant US attorney. He also was of counsel with the Missouri-based James Otis Law Group. I know many alums of that are in this room. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mr. Scharf served as a law clerk for the Honorable Edith B. Clement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the Honorable Raymond W. Grunder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. And most importantly, he gives me hope that I will not peak in law school as a Harvard Fed Soccer. Joining us as moderator, we have Mr. O.H. Skinner, President and CEO of American JurisLink and Executive Director of the Alliance for Consumers. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Scharf and Mr. Skinner. Well, this is maybe... The highlight that all of you should hope to have, which is that you get to interview a very close friend of yours on stage and get to ask them whatever you want. I think it's really important that Sheldon shows governments are instituted among men because something that Will's taught me more than anything else is that when you go into a role in government, the people around you are the definition of what you get done. It's not resumes and it's not reputations. It's the actual nature of the person that you're dealing with. And you taught me that by talking a lot about your views of the founders. We heard at the last panel about how nobody learns about the founding anymore. But in your job, I have a deep suspicion based on knowing you that some aspects of what you do every day are actually informed by or motivated by your view of the founders as people. Is that true? Yeah, for sure. First of all, I'd just like to start off by thanking the Federalist Society, my dear friend Sheldon Gilbert, for the invitation to be here today. Thank you very much. It's actually really weird to me to be sitting on a stage like this, particularly with OH. When I was a 1L at Harvard, I sent a random email to a Federalist Society inbox asking for information on how to join the Federalist Society Because I was A somewhat precocious gunner of a conservative, and the person who responded to that email was O.H. And in all things sort of conservative lawyering, as I was learning about the law and learning about the practice of the law, O.H. was really my first guide through that process. And in the lead up to the Federalist Society Convention that November, I didn't think that I could, you know, skip a couple days of class and go on this junket to D.C. I was a 1L, and I was trying to do well in my classes, and oh really put his foot down and demanded that I join the HLS delegation here to the Mayflower, and it was one of the really the best decisions I made my 1L year, certainly, and something that obviously had a great impact on my life going forward, Thank you for being associated with FedSoc. So many of the great people that are here for this conference. In terms of your question, the White House is a place that's suffused with history, and it's really tough to go about daily life there, to go about the work that we do, at least for me, without thinking about that. You know, I have the great honor of sitting in the office that legends like Fred Fielding sat in before me. One of my favorite stories was, you know, in the first couple weeks of the administration, I had just become staff secretary, and we were looking at issues relating to appropriate uses of the auto pen. That was a huge political issue. It was one that was very important to the president. I should note, by the way, that I'm here speaking in a personal capacity only. So we start researching the auto pen. You know, I always want to find, you know, the history of an issue and really dig deep. And we start pulling out these OLC opinions on appropriate use of, you know, signature reproduction. And they're written by, you know, by Justice Scalia, by Chief Justice Rehnquist when they were in OLC. And we keep pulling at the threads and we keep going further and further back. And we find an attorney general opinion by William Wirt. That refers to, you know, issues about mechanical reproduction of a signature of, in that case it was, I think, the Secretary of the Treasury. So really the history, everything that came before us, it has an immediate impact on the work that we do, in part because the work that we do is so unique. Getting the opportunity to, you know, practice law at this sort of a level for the federal government, it's truly been the greatest honor of my life. life and I think I'd certainly be remiss if I didn't often think about the folks who have been in similar positions previously really going back to the founding era. I remember there was one moment from a previous Federalist Society conference that really sticks out in my mind. I was sitting out by the old lobby bar, the Mayflower, with a few other students, and we were having drinks with Richard Brookhiser. And for those of you who haven't read his series of biographies on founding era figures, he did a Lincoln, they're really just, they're some of my favorite books. His Gouverneur Morris book, The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution is, like, I cannot recommend it in high enough terms. But we're talking to Brookhiser, he had just come out with a book, and one of my fellow students asked him, you know, Mr. Brookhiser, do you ever have trouble relating to the subjects of your biographies since, you know, they all lived so long ago? Thank you. Brookhiser was clearly waiting for this question. I hope he's not in the room right now. But was clearly waiting for this question and had one of the greatest sort of pre-canned answers I've ever heard. And he goes, in my youth, I once heard a speech by Alger Hiss, the famous communist spy and State Department official. Alger Hiss served as a law clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously served alongside President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. I believe he was at the Battle of Fort Stewart. And a very young Abraham Lincoln, in his only term in the House of Representatives, served alongside John Quincy Adams, who was in his last term in the U.S. House of Representatives shortly before his death. Brookhiser pauses and goes, and Quincy was an eyewitness to the founding of our country and was an eyewitness to every one of the subjects of the biographies that I've written. And he sort of holds up his hands and he goes, you know, me, Alger Hiss, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams. That's less than six degrees of separation between us and the generation that founded this country. And the clear implication was that we were the sixth degree of separation as facilitated by him. And that framing really stuck with me. We're in the 250th year of our country. It's a monumental achievement that the republic has lasted as long as it has, in my view. But really, we are a very, very young country, and I had the opportunity as staff secretary to get to travel around the world with the president. We went to Windsor Castle. You know, the first bricks of that were laid in 1066, you know, with the Norman Conquest. We are a young country, and I think that, you know, that poses some difficulties. We don't have, you know, the historical traditions of... Some of the older monarchies, but it also means that I think our founding is much more relatable that we're a you know We're a country that was created by figures whose political concerns whose political animations. I think can really still speak to all of us today And again, you know serving in the in the role that I've been you know Honored to serve in or the roles up and honored to serve in for the last two years two years. That that history really is relevant It certainly informs what we do on a daily basis, as was the case with our memo on the appropriate use of the mechanical signature pen. Something else that you have done a huge job in whenever you talk to, like, my kids is about the founding is you make these people feel very human and you remind people that they are both mythical figures in their accomplishments but that they were not made of mythical stuff, right? So there's an aspect of something not being fully written that the people in question don't know that they will succeed. You've talked about this a lot with me, the people in the actions do not know where their story will end. And we look back and say, oh, it was written that the Constitution would be like thus, and that the Declaration would happen like thus, and that the Revolution would be won, right? But you always remind me that the people in this time did not always know that, they didn't always believe it, and they believed it, but at a level where it was hope, right? Yeah. I mean, Franklin, you know, we must... All assuredly hang together, or we will hang separately. My favorite story along those lines, though, is actually from George Washington's post-presidency. Thank you. You know, George Washington, one of the greatest men in history, King William IV of England called him the greatest man who's ever lived. Thank you very much. After he leaves the presidency, he sort of retreats to Mount Vernon and engages in wild land speculation out west. And visitors to Mount Vernon, who were expecting to sort of learn at the feet of this incredibly Great man, and he truly was. We're surprised that he would pitch them on these sort of land speculation deals out West. There's a Polish nobleman, I'm blanking on his name, he was an eminent poet and a great Polish patriot, who writes about this at some length in his diary of his visit to Mount Vernon, that President Washington keeps talking about the great opportunity of these Western lands and building canals and opening up the West. Both for patriotic reasons, but also because that's where his business interests lay. And it brings home that we do lionize our founders, we should. They were truly great men, and we live in their shadow. But they were still men. The thing I like the most about Brookhiser's Gouverneur Morris biography is it really personalizes him. Gouverneur Morris, incredible attorney, incredible American patriot, an early abolitionist, just a really great man. Also, a famed womanizer who was proud of the story, probably apocryphal, circulated about him, that he wore a peg leg because he had mangled his leg jumping out of one of his paramour's windows late at night. I think it was actually a carriage accident, but the fact that Gouverneur Morris was sort of amused by this and let it sort of stand out there tells you about what a character he was. You read Madison's notes on the federal convention. These were brilliant, brilliant people. But there's also just the degree of sort of pettiness and interpersonal dynamics that comes through as well. Luther Martin of Maryland, who is on the wrong side of just about everything historically, was a noted anti-federalist, but was considered one of the truly great attorneys of the early republic. You know, Luther Martin argues the Maryland side of McCulloch v. Maryland. He defends Aaron Burr at his treason trial, defends Samuel Chase at his impeachment trial, which is one of the most interesting moments in early American history to me. Luther Martin at one point stands up and gives, I think, like an eight-hour speech at the federal convention, and Madison records it in basically a paragraph and a half. It's like at this point Luther Martin stood up and discoursed at some length and nobody listened to him. Which I'm guessing is not what actually happened, but these were two men who were clearly on opposite sides of things and didn't have much of that personal rapport, you know, between them. But it really just brings home that, you know, the political fights that we have today, the nature of government today, you know, things can seem, you know, very hostile, very difficult, but we've lived through times like that in American history before and that was certainly the case in the founding era. So, another thing that you have always explicated very carefully to me is this idea that people's trajectories, they are judged based on the end, and they are rarely judged based on these moments in between. And I think that you brought up Aaron Burr, which is your favorite topic. Aaron Burr, I think, is a perfect example of this, or if there's others you have, of people where we look back and think this person was great or terrible, but there were moments along the way How they were judged by their colleagues Or where they could have gone was not at all where they ended up being. And I just think that that is something that we forget about the arc of a person's life because we frequently look back and they get two sentences in a book. You know, my children only know about Gouverneur Morris because of you. Thank you. You can tell that I've sort of corrupted his poor children at a young age. I also read a few children's books like Duck for President and Click Clack, Moo Cows, Lick Clack, and all that. And Will's very aware that Governor Morris is perhaps the only founder with a prosthetic. These are all very important things to my family. But you talk about this idea that somebody gets two sentences in a book, right? But they had years of their lives in between. And in the moment, somebody thinks that one of them is going to be president. In the moment, someone thinks that Aaron Burr is going to be something that he doesn't end up being, right? Yeah, so O.H. knows that if you get me going on Aaron Burr... It was a condition of well-doing in his speech, just in case anyone's curious. So Burr is an incredibly complicated figure in American history and is portrayed as sort of the true villain of the early republic, and there are aspects of truth to that. One thing that's always fascinated me when you think about history, again, to get sort of personal about these guys, Um, you know, You know, they say that history is written by the winners, and I think that's wrong, but history is written by elites. And typically, throughout American history, the same is the case in other countries as well, really going back to classical antiquity, populist movements tend to get written out of conventional histories. Aaron Burr, more than anything else, I think was sort of the first great American populist and created a political machine in early New York. That really sets the stage for almost everything that follows in early American politics as opposed to the early American government. So Martin Van Buren, who's the figure probably more than any other, who makes Jacksonianism the dominant political movement in America, he comes out of the Aaron Burr machine, the Tammany machine in New York. I mean, he's originally from Kinderhook, but becomes deeply enmeshed in Tammany. Burr himself is largely responsible for the election of Thomas Jefferson. He flips the New York legislature by enfranchising new voters in 1800 in time for them to award their electoral votes to Jefferson, which is Jefferson's electoral margin. Thank you very much. Aaron Burr is, in many respects, I think we owe him a lot of credit for our independent judiciary, that when Jefferson moves hard against John Marshall, An attempt to queue up an impeachment of John Marshall by first impeaching Samuel Chase of Maryland, who's in and of himself a fascinating historical figure. If you're burning. Burr is the outgoing vice president, and he presides over that first impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate and insists on rules of evidence and normal procedure that end up defeating the impeachment trial against Samuel Chase, and no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached since. So again, I think when you look at history, you need to look at these guys, warts and all. We don't need to talk about the Burr plot in the West that results in his indictment for treason at this time. But Burr is one of those figures that I think it's very easy to caricature. But when you actually look at the historical record, I mean, he was a great American war hero from the Revolution. He had tremendous political purchase in his time. And as we think about the founding era, and particularly as we look to compare the founding era, To American politics that followed, the American political history that followed, it behooves us to look at sort of early American populism and understand how that ties into Jacksonianism, frankly how that ties into post-Civil War politics in many parts of the country. I think Roscoe Conklin is another guy who's sort of terribly misunderstood when you think about American political history, You know, vilified because of his opposition to civil service reform. She called it snivel service reform. Not taking a position on that, obviously, but Conklin, again, immensely powerful political figure in his time who's too often caricatured, you know, when we think about conventional history of the United States. When we think about this, right, you're describing each of these people who taught them who they worked for. You start talking about the tasks that defined them, right? One of my favorite stories that you tell is how when Washington marches into New York. Do you know where I'm going with this? Yeah. When Washington marches into New York, do you want to describe it? To me. You always tell the story of this very personal thing that he does because in that time, you don't have the Internet. These personalized moments matter. And this is one of my favorite stories about Washington. You know, I studied military history as an undergrad, and that was really my first great love. I had incredible professors at Princeton. In a different world, I would have gone on to be a military history professor, and I probably would have slept a lot more and had a lot more hair. But, you know, Washington crossing the Delaware, We're By all conventional metrics, by the way that they thought about, you know, operational arts at that time, was utter madness. Yes. Washington was, I mean, the Patriot cause was very much on a back leg. The army was dysfunctional. They had just been handed a string of terrible defeats. And Washington decides to roll the dice. This isn't Caesar, you know, Alea Iacta-esque. Caesar knew what he was doing. Caesar had a plan. Washington makes this incredibly bold stroke, and if you look at his writings, which is what I think O.H. is referring to, he didn't know that it was going to work. He didn't even, I think, think it was going to work. But I think in his mind, if we were going to go down, we were going to go down fighting, and this was the best plan he had at his disposal. And Trenton and Princeton end up being absolute master strokes. They keep the Patriot cause together for, you know, through a terrible winter and into another year. It shows the British that we still have fight left in us, shows the Hessians that maybe they miscalculated their involvement in the struggle. It's one of those moments in history that really could have gone either way. And there's an alternate history where the river was a little more frozen, or some of the boats got lost, or the columns didn't converge at exactly the right time. Where we'd be reading about how Washington, you know, gambled away the Patriot cause and lost. And it's those decisive moments in history. You think Eisenhower before D-Day is very similar. Where we look at them with, you know, with the, you know, fortunate that we have, you know, hindsight. And we can look back and we know what happened. But standing in their shoes is just remarkably difficult because they don't have that benefit. I think about that a lot, you know, You know, in my current role working in the White House, You know, we make decisions on a day-to-day basis with good information, but often very imperfect information, and you often wonder, you know, how certain decisions will be viewed, you know, by posterity, you know, in the fullness of time, and it's difficult to almost accept by thinking of them with reference to folks who have come before, and Washington crossing the Delaware, I mean, it's just, it's one of the most incredible moments of the revolution. Daniel Morgan at Cowpens is another great example of that, where an American decides to do something wildly unconventional, and it pans out in a way that now we view as these incredible master strokes, but in their time must have been thought of, and they must have thought of them as just incredibly risky. Okay. I feel like I have to do something that's not just about the founding so people can understand you. You're a man who we went to very similar. Let's just keep talking about the founding. It's so much fun. Should we talk about Cowpens? Cowpens was one of the great tactical master strokes of the revolution. It was one of the only unique things that an American general did during the Revolutionary War. Morgan essentially feigns a retreat. He knows the British expect his militia to run. The militia always ran in the face of a bayonet charge. So he sets things up and tells the militia that he had at his disposal, fire two shots and then run away. And he developed his entire tactical plan for the battle around giving the British what they thought they were going to see. And Banastre Tarleton, with his legion, falls right into the trap. William Washington ends up closing in from behind with his cavalry. The Continental line holds, and Tarleton's force just collapses in on itself. But again, you look at the battle plan by sort of every conventional metric available to them at the time, and it should have seemed like utter madness. And it's just another one of those great examples in the founding era where we got it really right and we're all very fortunate that they did. So I hope everyone's had a few moments to realize that every single one of Will's stories identifies the people in the story. This is why I'm very grateful that Sheldon chose this panel topic. Everybody else, you don't realize this, everyone else would tell the story and talk about the American forces, the British forces. You identify who's in charge, what their choices were, how they made their decisions, and it's always So now I want somebody to learn something about you. You are a man who has grown up and gone to a lot of the same institutions I have, and Missouri is one of your greatest loves. I don't understand it. I grew up in Indiana, and I now live in Arizona. But when I talk to you when you're in Missouri, it's different than when you're here. I don't know if you want to take a minute to describe to people what Missouri means to you because it's something that I think most people I don't realize they think that you just happen to have landed in Missouri, but yeah It's a I mean normally if you were not working at the White House You would have on boots that had the Missouri State seal on the front of them Just everyone's aware, but could you talk about that because I think it's a defining characteristic of you. Yeah, I I, uh... I'll tell a fun FedSoc story when I was at HLS. We used to have a poker game And from time to time, you know conservative lawyers sometimes judges who were in town would stop by and sit in and play with us. Thank you very much. And Ted Cruz was one of those folks. He's a very, very good poker player. Never sit down and play poker with Ted Cruz. But he was with Morgan Lewis at the time. He was obviously not yet a senator. Thank you, Senator. And to us, he was an incredible guy. He'd argued Medellin at the U.S. Supreme Court. He'd been this incredible Solicitor General of Texas. And I actually asked him what advice he would give to You know, to someone like me, or to folks like us, and he basically said, in a few more words than this, you know, get the heck off the coast. Don't fall into the New York trap, don't get sucked into D.C., go to a state and do something remarkable there. And at the time I remember thinking that was very unhelpful advice, like not all of us can just go off and become the Solicitor General of Texas. Then my first clerkship out of law school was with Ray Grunder in St. Louis, an incredible judge. He's been an incredible friend and mentor to me. And within about a month of landing in St. Louis, I just realized that I liked the Midwest much better than the New York that I'd grown up in or even the Florida where my parents lived. I'd worked in D.C., I'd worked in New York. Missouri just made a lot more sense to me. There's a great sense of community there. People really care about each other. You think about what America's supposed to be about, you read Tocqueville. There's a lot of that in St. Louis. There's a lot of people coming together, people really caring about the community that they live in. And as I got into Missouri politics and worked more around the state, The smaller and smaller you get, the smaller town you go to, the more of that spirit is really present. So I became a real Missouri devotee. I bounced around a bit, but I've spent basically 15 and a half years there now. I still own my home there. I make it back at every opportunity. I'm sure there are some young lawyers and law students here in the room. It's very easy to take sort of the well-trod course from elite law school to big law firm. You know, you go to the big cities because that's where the, you know, oftentimes, frankly, the best legal work is. But I'd encourage you to look elsewhere. You know, there are incredible opportunities in state houses and state government. There are incredible opportunities in smaller cities around America and even smaller than that. I know my friend Amber Hulse is somewhere around here. She's an outstanding young lawyer who worked with Dillon Law Group or works with Dillon Law Group. She's also a state senator in South Dakota and is now at a very young age in leadership out there. She's going to have an immense impact on that state and its politics, its legal culture for decades into the future. I'm sure she had opportunities to move here to D.C. I know she did because we offered to bring her into the White House. Thank you very much. I'm sure she'd have great opportunities wherever she'd want to go. But the fact that she's in her home state doing great things for it, I think, is commendable. And I think the founders would look kindly on it. You know, they were men motivated by a common patriot spirit. Certainly the Federalists, you know, wanted to bring our country closer together. But when you look back and really look at how they identified, how they thought about themselves, distinct state cultures, distinct local cultures were very important to them. And that's kind of the beauty of Federalism, that we do have a central government. We want energy in the executive always. We have a very energetic executive in President Trump now. But there's also this idea that some things are best left to the states. Some things are better decided at a more local, at a more communal level. And I think that's key to America. And certainly for me, Missouri's been the home I never knew that I wanted and needed when I was a young child in New York. And it's been an incredible home to me. I know there are a lot of Missourians in the room. I saw a couple of you all when I was walking in. But, yeah, I just take the opportunity to thank the great state of Missouri. There are a lot of Missourians in this administration. My former law partner, John Sowers, obviously a solicitor general. Eric Schmidt, Senator Eric Schmidt, refers to us as the Missouri Mafia. You can't sort of turn a corner in this administration without running into a Missouri lawyer. And we're very proud of the work that we've done. Okay, so my last question to you is, I think, Every Supreme Court fight that has occurred since we became, you know, sentient adult lawyers, you have been closely involved in. And one of the defining characteristics of kind of the court as it is in recent years as the conservatives and people in this room have become ascendant is longstanding, dubious precedents have fallen. I think I told you I would ask you some question like this. When you look back, you know, what is the case in the recent terms that has Fixed an error, righted a wrong, whatever phrase you want to use, that you're the most excited about or that means the most to you. There's a long line of them that we can all check off, but I think it's interesting which one most people in their own life identify with. Yeah, so OH knows what my answer is going to be. Like, we're best friends, so, like, this is a setup, but it's slaughter. When we were law students, you know, you read Scalia's dissent in Morrison v. Olson. You know, I came of age during sort of the Bush years when unitary executive theory was, I think, first coming into vogue. I saw John Yoo when I was walking in. I hope I don't tick him off by what I'm about to say. But slaughter was an immensely important case that I think corrected a very, very poor and quite ancient precedent. Mr. President, And I think it really speaks to what I think of as the principal goals of the Federalist Society. Which is bringing American constitutional law back in line with the Constitution. You know, the vesting clause of Article 2, in my view, is pretty clear. And a president who, you know, can't control who's exercising the executive power that is vested in him, that's a cabined presidency. I think Slaughter, the Supreme Court, did a masterful job, really got it right. I was proud that, you know, we as the White House and obviously the Department of Justice I got to play a role in correcting that, you know, historic constitutional wrong, and particularly given, you know, given Morrison, given the history, given sort of how large those precedents have loomed, getting to be a part of the administration that, you know, played a role in delivering the slaughter opinion, very, very proud of that. So, by total accident, and having nothing to do with the fact that I've talked to Will before this, American Jurislink occasionally makes coins for great Supreme Court cases. And so, Will, here is our Trump vs. Slaughter coin. Love this. By total accident, that's in my pocket. I should also – so on the obverse of this coin, it says around the outside, commemorating generational wins at the Supreme Court, and I don't think there's a better way to describe slaughter than that, truly a generational win at the U.S. Supreme Court. This is quite beautiful. Thank you. So I should note that I'm supposed to read a script here, which is that after this is lunch. Lunch will be in buffets here but also on the second floor, and there will be various sock sidebar events. There's a lot of words I don't know what all of them mean, but if you are proceeding to lunch upstairs, you will find several hundred coins of Trump v Slaughter and others that will be a surprise to you So I highly encourage anybody who is even remotely interested in such a thing to find their way quickly upstairs for the lunch Thank you so much. I also want to just ask everyone to I'm going to... Give a round of applause for Will's job The press of Will's job goes beyond anything I think any of you could possibly comprehend, no matter what your imagination may be. And yet he has chosen to spend time with us here today, in the middle of the workday. And I think that speaks to how much this place means to him, how much this hotel means to him, and how he grew up as a lawyer. But I also just think that everyone should give him a round of applause for the time he has taken from our country to lead it. Also, Cam is dating to a no-law group. I can give you all some tips on what to eat at the UPS on a rate of their UFB. And most of that time, I'm all the time. I'm Fred, I'm just Fred's CEO, and thank you for joining us. Join the show.