Key Takeaways
- The president can pardon only federal offenses, and a pardon can cover crimes that were never charged, as President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon did.
- No court has decided whether a president may pardon himself; a 1974 Justice Department opinion said no, while others read the Constitution as allowing it.
- Under the Justice Department's view, a pardon forgives the offense and restores civil rights but does not erase the conviction from the record.
Can a president pardon himself? Can he pardon someone who has never been charged with a crime? And what does a pardon actually do to a conviction?
In this TalksOnLaw Brief, Judge Andrew Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey and host of the program Judging Freedom, explains the president's pardon power under Article II of the Constitution, which he describes as "full, final and absolute." He walks through who can be pardoned, for what, and with what effect.
A Power with Few Limits
Judge Napolitano explains that a presidential pardon cannot be appealed, cannot be legislated away, and cannot be challenged or checked by the other branches. It reaches only federal crimes, but within that sphere it covers offenses that have been charged and offenses that have not. A president, he notes, could pardon a predecessor, a successor, or a former rival who ran for president and lost. In his view, the answer to whether a president could pardon himself is yes, and he recounts that Richard Nixon explored the idea before deciding he would rather not be the first to do it and would leave the decision to his vice president.
The Ford Pardon of Nixon
The best-known example is President Gerald Ford's 1974 proclamation granting "a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed." Judge Napolitano points out that most pardons are directed to a specific crime, but Ford's was not, because Nixon had never been charged with one.
What a Pardon Does
Judge Napolitano describes a pardon as wiping out the conviction. In his account, a person pardoned after serving a long federal sentence could truthfully say under oath that he never committed a federal crime. In that sense, he says, a pardon "has the effect of rewriting history."
What to Know Now
The pardon power remains one of the broadest in the Constitution. In Trump v. United States (2024), the Supreme Court listed the power to grant pardons among the president's core constitutional powers and recalled earlier decisions holding that Congress cannot limit a pardon's effect. Recent years brought broad uses of it: President Biden's preemptive pardon of his son Hunter in December 2024 and of several public officials and family members in January 2025, and President Trump's January 2025 clemency for roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with the events of January 6, 2021. Claims in 2025 that pardons signed by autopen were void have been widely disputed, and many legal experts note that no law requires a handwritten signature. Whether a president may pardon himself remains unresolved. A 1974 opinion of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel concluded that he could not, on the principle that no one may be a judge in his own case, while others, like Judge Napolitano, read the text as containing no such limit. On a pardon's effect, the Justice Department's position is that it lifts penalties and restores civil rights but does not erase the conviction from the record, and the Supreme Court in Burdick v. United States (1915) described accepting a pardon as carrying an imputation of guilt. How far the "rewriting history" view extends continues to be debated.
