“The fact that the President may have his own personal criminal immunity for ordering either the assassination of his rival or a coup does not make these orders lawful. And while military members have a legal obligation to follow lawful orders, they have a similar obligation to disobey unlawful orders,” Professor Anthony Ghiotto writes in a new article published in the NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy. Following Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent from Trump v. United States, in which she employs a hypothetical of the President ordering SEAL Team 6 to execute his rival, Ghiotto posits that the military may become the vanguard of a presidential coup, instead of the final check against it.
