Crime, the Opioid Crisis, and Gun Violence: New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin on How Action at the State Level Is Making a Difference

Matt Platkin: Arrive Together is a program that I’m extraordinarily proud of in New Jersey, and it was born out of a recognition that we’ve asked law enforcement in this country to do too much. We can’t expect any one person to be a patrol officer, a social worker, a psychologist, an addiction recovery specialist, and every other thing that we ask them to do when someone calls 911.

Rich Ford: This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. I’m Rich Ford with Pam Karlan. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app. That way you’ll have access to all of our new episodes as soon as they’re available.

In today’s episode, we’re looking at the role of state attorneys general. What do they do? Why are they important? Some of you may know that an attorney general, a former attorney general, is running for President of the United States. And we’re fortunate, in fact thrilled, to have as our guest today, a former Stanford Law School student, Matt Platkin who’s the Attorney General of New Jersey.

Matt was appointed by Governor Phil Murphy in 2022 and confirmed to that role with bipartisan support of the New Jersey State Senate. He’s the youngest attorney general ever appointed in the United States. And as New Jersey’s chief law enforcement officer, Matt’s prioritized the safety of New Jersey residents by focusing on a number of important issues, from combating violent crime, implementing innovative public safety strategies, to the opioid epidemic, and to gun violence.

The attorney general leads a department that touches the life and of nearly every New Jersey citizen, and its sweeping responsibilities include investigating and prosecuting crimes, representing the state’s interest in court, enforcing strong consumer protection and civil rights statutes and regulating important industries, and overseeing over 38,000 law enforcement officers throughout the state.

Welcome back. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Matt Platkin: Thank you for having me.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, it’s so super to have you here. And it’s wonderful to see alums here and to see so many of my former students. We are just incredibly proud of the work that Stanford Law School graduates do around the country, and it’s stunning the range of things that you all do when you leave here, starting with being the coach of the Stanford women’s basketball team and going through judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, people in elected office, people who work for corporations, people who work for public interest organizations, and of course, Matt, who is the Attorney General of New Jersey.

I wanted to start with one of the things that you all are doing that I think is one of the most fascinating things, and that’s the Arrive Together program. And I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what that is and how innovative it is and why that’s important.

Matt Platkin: Sure. First of all, thank you, Pam and Rich, for having me and, it’s so great to be back. Law school is just … every time I come on campus, I smile, which I still wonder –As my boss said, I’m the only person dumb enough to move from the Bay Area to New Jersey twice. But I’m really thrilled to be back here. And I was a little nervous when I saw that the time [for the podcast recording] overlapped with the football game. And so I don’t know if that’s a comment on the attendance, the strong attendance here, or is a comment on how interesting we are or how the performance of the football team this year. But I’ll leave that, I’ll leave that up to you all.

Arrive Together is a program that I’m extraordinarily proud of in New Jersey, and was born out of, I think, a recognition that we’ve asked law enforcement in this country to do too much, that we can’t expect any one person to be a patrol officer, a social worker, a psychologist, an addiction recovery specialist, and every other thing that we ask them to do when someone calls 911.

I’m a lawyer. My wife’s a psychologist. I don’t want to do what she does. And I think she dislikes lawyers. So when we were doing this work, one of the things that’s unique about New Jersey is every fatal police encounter that occurs in the state, my office independently investigates and presents the case to the grand jury, every single one. And when you watch tragedy after tragedy, enough of these. Even in cases where there was legal justification, as there often is, to use lethal force, you can often see where things could have been done differently to get the person the help that they need. And in New Jersey, two-thirds of all uses of force by a law enforcement officer involve somebody struggling with mental health or behavioral health crises.

And that’s true generally across the country, but in New Jersey, we track every single use of force. So, a couple years ago, we created a program originally in South Jersey as a partnership between state police and the county prosecutor there, where we sent to these calls of mental health and emotional distress, a plainclothes law enforcement officer teamed up with a mental health professional in an unmarked car. That was the original model. It was like a co- responder model, which has been done in some parts of the country. We have since expanded it throughout the state. We’re the first state in the country to have an alternative crisis response model operational statewide. We’re serving about 55 percent of the state’s population and working to get to 100%. We’ve even, on our website, you can see we’ve tracked every single interaction. So we’re now over 5,000 interactions. We’ve had zero injuries, zero arrests. And essentially eliminated the use of force. The only few instances where officers used force was at the direction of a clinician in the context of involuntarily transporting somebody to medical treatment.

Again, it’s, you’re proving a negative because we don’t know how many of these cases would have resulted in a use of force. But we know that two-thirds of all uses of force involve mental health. And we’ve now had 5,000 data points where we’ve been able to get people the healthcare they need, avoid injuries to officers or to civilians and, importantly, build trust because each place we’ve expanded it, we’ve started with community engagement. We’ve talked to the community about what they want to see out of their law enforcement. We put the community at front and center and it’s really been an incredible tool for building bridges and building trust that we know is essential for law enforcement to do their jobs and for the community to have faith that they have their back.

Pam Karlan: I mean it just from reading about the program it seemed like an amazing and incredibly effective program. On the other hand, you wonder why did it take so long to figure out that this was and that’s doing…

Matt Platkin: That’s an amazing thing about this. This is not a complicated program, at least in New Jersey where we’re so dense. If you go to some of the more rural states, when you’re talking about covering large terrain, it can be a little bit more challenging. The real limiting factor is that this country is under invested in mental health providers. We have plenty of law enforcement officers. We have way too few social workers, psychologists, screeners and that is really where the bottleneck comes. But generally speaking, we have done this program using existing resources. I went to the legislature and got $10 million the first year, which sounds like a lot of money, but the budget’s $60 billion in New Jersey, so it’s not a huge expense.

I don’t know the total state or law enforcement spend in the state, but it’s a lot more than $10 million. And then we got 10 more million. So we’re doing all of this statewide activity with total of $20 billion budget. So it’s really not an expensive program either. It was just getting folks to work together.

And now the most rewarding piece of it, aside from obviously all the people that were helping, that’s first and foremost. But when we do a lot of events with participating officers and mental health professionals, and when they talk, you know, in the beginning, they didn’t even speak the same language.

They wouldn’t sit at the same table, they wouldn’t drive in the same car, and now they’re like finishing each other’s sentences. And we’ve seen in the data that even officers that participate in this program, and departments that do, even on times that they’re not doing an Arrive shift, when the Arrive screen’s not up and running, their performance has improved because they’re getting, incredible training and experience. We have the best, I believe, the best trained officers in the country, New Jersey. Every single one of our officers has to do bystander intervention and de-escalation training to participate in Arrive you have to do 40 hour crisis intervention team training, which is an intensive mental health and law enforcement training.

But on top of that, they’re getting hours and hours of these shifts where they’re learning from each other and becoming more effective and being more willing to pull in existing resources. And that’s why, as of  January we issued a directive a month or two ago. We will now require every time there’s a crisis negotiation in the state, they have to incorporate a mental health professional directly into that response.

Because too often what happens in those crises is things escalate because we don’t bring the mental health professionals and importantly, community members and family members, to the point of the negotiation to help deescalate. Time is our best friend in these crises. You don’t need to force a resolution. We can get people the health they need and get them the health they need safely.

Pam Karlan: So I want to turn to another aspect of the job that you’re doing that also involves substance abuse and mental health, and that’s the opioid crisis. There obviously there’s the huge big lawsuit, which is now still going on, but there’s also a lot of other work that you’re doing in New Jersey.

Matt Platkin: So the opioid epidemic numbers are down, thankfully, but we’re still losing close to a 9-11 in New Jersey every year in terms of the number of people dying from opioid overdose. And that’s true across the country. I’m proud of the fact that a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general led the Lawsuits against the largest manufacturers and distributors of opioids, resulting in tens of billions of dollars in recoveries for states that is now currently being spent.

And importantly: the first real time state AGs came together and sued affirmatively was the tobacco litigation in the nineties. And those litigations were really important, obviously, because they helped transform the way we regulate tobacco in this country and brought relief. But the money, if you look at how the money was spent, in a lot of states, and New Jersey, sadly, is no exception to this, it was not used very effectively. So, one of the things we did in the opioid settlements is that we required that the money that comes into the states go to programs that don’t currently exist. That you can’t just replace existing spending streams or fill budget holes with it. That it has to go to new evidence-based treatment. So we’ve funded harm reduction centers through this work. We funded new drug diversionary courts. We supported programs, mental health programs like Arrive. And so that work is ongoing. And then we’ve separately through our office, I created a new again, I swear I’m not like empire building, but I’ve created the first office of its kind in the country. It’s a statewide alternative response program. Again, just trying to understand and reflect the fact that we know there are different models than a punitive approach to addressing what are really public health crises. And so through programs like our Operation Helping Hand, where we help hand people off to treatment as opposed to putting them in the criminal justice system, new diversionary programs, we’ve really been able to get people help they need. Again, treating this like it is a clinical challenge, not a criminal one.

Pam Karlan: And in thinking about public health, another public health thing that I know is a huge priority of yours is gun violence. Yeah. And gun deaths.

Matt Platkin: Yeah. Look, gun violence is the issue that got me interested in public service. The first issue I ever went door to door on was in 2003, 2004, the renewal of the federal assault weapons ban, which we had for 10 years federally. We still have one in New Jersey, though we were just talking about the post-Bruin litigation landscape. The NRA and NSSF, which is the Sportsman Foundation that leads, they’re probably, NRA is better known, but NSSF is really the driver behind most of the litigation. They said publicly, we want to strike down.every single one of New Jersey’s gun safety laws.

Pam Karlan: What’s the sport that people use assault weapons for?

Matt Platkin: If you find it, let me know. They, fortunately, knock on wood, they have been unsuccessful in all their challenges so far, though we’re in the Third Circuit on a number of them. But New Jersey has the strongest gun laws in the country, along with California. And we also have one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country, along with states like California. That’s not a coincidence. The evidence is empirically clear. You are safer in states that have strong gun safety laws. You’re six times, six times more likely to be shot and killed in Mississippi than you are in New Jersey. Now, I live in New Jersey, so I can say this. I don’t think people in Mississippi are inherently more violent than us. But they have greater access to firearms, and particularly for people who shouldn’t have access to those firearms.

So, I believe, if we’re going to address this problem, And if we can’t rewrite the Second Amendment, and I’ll leave it to smarter folks in this room to tell me how we can do that, then we have to treat it like it is. As you said, Pam, it’s a public health crisis. It is an epidemic. And the same way we attacked the COVID epidemic or the opioid epidemic, we have to attack this one.

And so what we’ve done in New Jersey is three … I think there’s three principal prongs to this. First is we’ve taken a much more intelligence-based approach to our criminal enforcement. Criminal enforcement absolutely plays a role, I will always say this, in driving down gun violence. But driving nets through whole communities is not an effective law enforcement strategy. Intelligence-based approach where you build intelligence based on who we know are truly driving large numbers of shootings in the state and frankly the location of a particular crime gun where a single crime gun might be used in 12 or 15 shootings. We can be far more effective and far less damaging to communities in identifying those who are are perpetrators of recidivist violence. So that’s a big piece of it. But if we just focus on criminal enforcement, we’re never going to address the problem. It’s just, we’re going to miss the mark. So two other things that we’ve done in New Jersey that I’m extraordinarily proud of is: one is we’ve invested heavily in community based strategies to reducing violence.

So if I were here in 2019, and you asked me, how much money are you putting in community based organizations? These are people who have credibility on the ground that someone with a badge is never going to have, who can reach largely kids or young adults who are engaged in cycles of violence and get them to resolve conflicts in nonviolent ways, in a way that, again, law enforcement just simply will not be able to do, I would have said we’re investing zero dollars at the state level in that work. Since 2020, we’ve invested $115 million in that work. I created a dedicated … I hired people from organizations to come in and run it so that there was credibility from our office and they could speak the same language. I formed a working group of law enforcement and community-based violence intervention specialists to set rules of the road for law enforcement as to how they can work together.

And then third, and this is certainly subject, as of a few weeks ago, now subject of Supreme Court litigation, we have aggressively used civil enforcement strategies to hold accountable an industry that at the federal level has been given one of Congress,  I think one of the worst laws Congress has ever passed: In 2005 President Bush signed it into law, gives broad federal immunity to the firearms industry. No other industry has this kind of protection from federal law. And this is the product that is the single greatest or single biggest cause of death for kids in America. But under that law, you can bring state lawsuits. And so we … I went and spent several years fighting for, we got a public nuisance law passed in New Jersey for firearm enforcement. I created the first office in the country dedicated to holding the firearm industry accountable when they violate state laws. Last year, I sued the largest gun show in Pennsylvania that was selling ghost guns into New Jersey.

I sued the ghost gun distributor. I sued a retailer that had 20 firearms in their window, not secured. They were so brazen about it, it actually ended up on Google Street View. You could, it was on their website. Lo and behold, someone broke the window, stole 20 firearms, and several of them, within weeks turned up in crimes in the state of New Jersey. So we sued them. Now, I don’t wake up every day wanting to sue for the sake of it, but we know that litigation can be a deterrent and can force companies to think about their actions and their need to comply with state laws. And so we are doing that and we are actively working with other states to bring that work.

So what has that done? Last year, we had the lowest number of shootings on record since New Jersey has been tracking it. We had 922 people shot. Now that’s 922 people too many. But if I was here a decade ago, I would have been talking about 1,500 people shot. And this year we’re 20 percent below where we were last year. We’re tracking to be under 800. Last year was the first time we were ever under 1,000. So in 20 years now, which is hard for me to believe, of being involved in this effort, it’s the first time that I’ve really felt hope. We talked so much about what the Supreme Court has done to this effort, how it’s made, how it’s hamstrung states. We were just talking about how crazy the Bruin decision is. But there are things we can do that save lives. And states like New Jersey, California that have put strong protections in place and taking a holistic approach can drive down violence.

Pam Karlan: How much of your work involves coordinating with other states, either in litigation or in some other kind of planning?

Matt Platkin: A lot. Yeah. And I think that is a, that probably was, if I were, we were talking when I was in law school, even to today, it’s meaningfully different. Particularly when we’re talking about federal litigation. Consumer protection cases, post-tobacco, that has been a thing, and there still is, and I’m proud of this, a fair amount of bipartisan coordination. I sit on the board of the National Association of Attorneys General. Unfortunately, the worst acronym for an organization ever, NAG.

Pam Karlan: Oh, I thought it, people always joke that it stands for National Association of Aspiring Governors.

Matt Platkin: I’m unelected, so I’m not going to comment on that. But I sit on the board of the bipartisan organization. I’m also involved in the Democratic Attorneys General Association and there is a Republican Attorneys General Association. But generally speaking, we coordinate a lot. We coordinate on affirmative cases that we’re bringing. That  we bring, so for instance the Meta, the complaint we filed against Meta in Northern District of California. We had it’s between the state and federal counterparts, I think 46 states on that case. Same high number for TikTok. We’re the lead state in the Apple antitrust litigation. We had 16 states on that filing and that’s growing. And then there’s, so there’s the bipartisan work and then there’s a lot of work that candidly has broken down along partisan lines.

And I think one of the biggest changes over the last decade is how much state attorneys general come together to sue the federal government. Now, it depends a little bit on which side of the aisle you are and who’s in the, who’s in the White House, but we know that is a very frequent source of litigation for state AGs.

Five, er, sorry, when we took office in 2018, when Governor Murphy took office, the state of New Jersey had, I think, maybe five attorneys doing a full-time affirmative work, almost none of which would have been in federal court. We now have 150 lawyers just doing full-time affirmative work. We didn’t have a Solicitor General’s office. We now have a Solicitor General who’s incredible and a team of almost 10 attorneys doing, coordinating our federal courts work, our state supreme court, and we coordinate a lot on amicus strategy with other states. And so it’s a really tight knit group. And frankly, that’s been one of the most incredible experiences as an attorney general is just seeing how closely we really do work together and how impressive so many of the other attorneys general across the country are in thinking about how can we use state authority? How can we stay in state court, because the federal courts have made it hard, and be creative to address problems that matter to the residents of our states.

Pam Karlan: So is the New Jersey Supreme Court still as innovative today is that as they were in the past? When you think about like great state supreme courts over history, there’s you know, a series of California Supreme Courts.

There’s the Oregon Supreme Court when Hans Lindy was there, and the New Jersey Supreme Court has been up there a number of times. What do you … what accounts for that? It’s not a state that honestly you think of initially as a state that’s going to have this tremendously innovative court.

Matt Platkin: Yeah, there, there’s a really fascinating history, which is like an only-in-New Jersey history. Newsflash: there’s still a corruption problem in New Jersey….

Pam Karlan: I saw you’ve just done another, a major indictment.

Matt Platkin: We have made it public –we can talk about that, we’ve made public corruption a real priority, but New Jersey has a couple of things. 1947, we have a new constitution. The founders really liked strong executive power, which as somebody who spent seven years in the executive branch, I’m okay with. They reated the strongest governor constitutionally in the country. Governor appoints everyone, including me, he can’t fire me but he appoints me once I’m confirmed. It created a very strong attorney general, which obviously again, I’m in favor of and then they created a very strong chief justice of the court. And there’s been a tradition in New Jersey, which Governor Murphy has upheld as recently as a month ago, to have a partisan balance on our Supreme Court.

So you can’t have more than one seat majority for any party. Our court, I think, has been a crown jewel. I was very proud as a law student here, when  we read Mount Laurel, which is the case that said every everyone mandated affordable housing in each of our communities, which we’re still implementing.

And Abbott, which was the case that equalized school spending across our lowest income communities. And I spoke about this when I was nominated. I was proud of that history and the fact that our Supreme Court said every child, no matter where they live, is entitled to a safe home and a quality education. And we are, on the record, I’m not gonna say anything other than positive things about the Supreme Court. And we are, on the record, I’m not gonna say anything other than positive things about the Supreme Court. But I really do mean it. They’ve been an incredibly thoughtful Court, over across political changes in the administration.

Rich Ford: Are you working on the affordable housing issue today? And what are some of the new issues that have come up with respect to that?

Matt Platkin: Yeah, so we have an interesting dynamic in New Jersey that I think, I’m a little out of touch with California, but I think is probably different. And that is a result of Mount Laurel, where they created litigation incentives for developers, meaning the people building the housing, and advocates for affordable housing to team up and come together and they have a right to sue. It’s called the builder’s remedy. They can sue to get the right to build new housing as long as it has affordable housing components. I’m giving a like 30-year litigation history in 20 seconds.

When Governor Christie was governor, he killed what was called the Council on Affordable Housing, which was the agency that sort of set the number of housing units for each community. So that resulted in hundreds of local litigation done by some friends of mine who are literally in fair share housing. I think they were like a staff of four. They sued 300 towns and they won them all. And they’re, we’re now in the process…The governor just signed a law to streamline this process of building hundreds of thousands of new affordable housing units throughout the state.

New Jersey is one of … California makes us look reasonably affordable, but we’re one of the most expensive states to live in America. And that is a core…. We’re also one of the most home rule balkanized states. We have 565 communities in a state of 9.3 million people. So housing is a big deal and I think most encouraging about this is when we, I remember talking about this in your class … forever growing up, this was always the thorniest political issue, politicians lost elections on supporting affordable housing development. The generational shift, both for younger New Jerseyans and older New Jerseyans about where they want to live for the folks that don’t retire to another state–It has really changed the politics in New Jersey where you now have mayors coming forward and want to build.

People want dense, more urban environments to live in. People want more diverse communities, and that’s a good thing. And that’s been a real political shift that I think has made some of this more possible, but we’re seeing huge investments in the development of new affordable housing in our state, which I’m really proud of.

Rich Ford: You mentioned that you studied the Mount Laurel case when you were in law school. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the path to the Attorney General’s office starting in law school. How did you .. did you know you wanted to be an Attorney General when you first took Pam’s class or my class?

And and what kind of skills are necessary for someone to reach the heights that you’ve reached?

Matt Platkin: I’m not sure I would have known what a state attorney general was when I was coming into law school. I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I didn’t … I didn’t grow up dreaming of being an attorney general. I guess it would be obnoxious if I admitted that now, if I did. But …

Pam Karlan: you wanted to be a basketball player.

Matt Platkin: Yeah. I wanted to be point guard at Stanford and then point guard for the Knicks and that, genetics have a way of shaping that possibility.

I knew I wanted to be involved in some form of public service. I knew I wanted to be involved most likely in government. And I had been involved before law school…. I graduated from Stanford and moved to D. C. with no job. My mom really loved that. Barack Obama had just won the presidency. We had 60 votes in the … I’m a Democrat. I’m non partisan, technically, but I’m a registered Democrat. And we had 60 votes in the Senate, which my kids will never see again on either side of the aisle. And we had a majority in the House. I applied to every single Democratic office on the hill, didn’t get a single interview. Ended up getting an interview at Brookings Institution. This is a true story, the guy who interviewed me, who ended up becoming my boss, fell asleep in my interview. For any students who are here, like that’s not usually a good sign. I followed up with him after, he wrote me back, like your name, your resume didn’t really make any sense, which it didn’t, it was an economics policy job, and I had studied political science. And, but he’s “since you followed up, you must really want to come work here, so he hired me.

And I’m convinced he hired me because my name was Matt. The guy who preceded me, his name was Matt. The guy who followed me, his name was Matt. And I just think it was just easier for him not to learn any new names. But I … nd then I had a really formative experience as Pam knows before law school. One of my best friends, I was working in D. C. The Democrats had just had, as the President said, a shellacking at the midterms in 2010. I was like depressed, ready to throw this, we’re not going to get anything done. And my friend, I was talking to him in San Antonio, Texas. He was my, met him the first day of college here, he’s from South San Antonio and he said, why don’t you come down, or I’m thinking of running for city council.

And I said, okay, if you run for city council, I’ll come run your campaign. I’d never been to San Antonio and I’d never run a campaign. So it was a little bit of an act of hubris, but I was really cheap. I moved into my friend’s mom’s house. We ran this incredible grass roots campaign. He ended up winning an upstart campaign.

It was non partisan and I spent a year just talking to people, like divorced from the politics, but just about what government meant to people’s lives. And that experience to this day, I’m very privileged and extraordinarily proud of the education I had at Stanford Law School and as Stanford undergrad, but that experience really shaped my thinking in a way that was very fundamental about the role that we as government officials play fundamental role in people’s lives. And so I knew, two things,: that I wanted to go back to government, and that I wanted to go back home and do it. And that I was somebody who wanted to be involved in New Jersey.

And what that meant, I didn’t know anybody. So I just, when I moved back, I just started talking to folks. Every week I would make a spreadsheet. And I would try to meet as many people. And during law school, one of the things I did, was I volunteered on Cory Booker’s special election, when he was running to replace Senator Frank Lautenberg. And I didn’t know anybody on his campaign. And somebody who’s now become like my best friend, I borderline, one of my best friends–I borderline harassed, I emailed him I think almost every day. And he emailed me back, I remember this, on July 2nd and said, could you write us a memo on the financial crisis? Kind of a big topic. And so I wrote him a 45-page single space memo and sent it to him three days later, which I now know no one reads …  but he called me, he’s “you must really want to help. So let’s do some more of this. “ I did that basically for two elections for Cory, Senator Booker.

I never asked for anything. I don’t, I never met him. I didn’t really know how it worked. And then unbeknownst to me, That person who I had been emailing referred me to Phil Murphy when he was thinking of putting together his team. And I got a call that would I like to meet him. And that sort of set me on a path.

Now he was, Phil Murphy when I joined his campaign in 2015 was, I joke, fourth out of a three-person race. He was like, no one thought he was going to win. So much so when I left the firm that I was at, they said … They told me I was throwing my career away, so I was like this is a little bit risky. But it ended up working out.

And I credit, frankly, I credit people I met at Stanford and the spirit of Stanford for making those choices where I felt comfortable enough knowing that I was going to be okay if things didn’t … I would land on my feet. And it was worth taking some risks early on in my career. Which ultimately led to this, which I think is probably the best job I’ll ever have.

Pam Karlan: We are so incredibly proud to have you as one of our alums. It’s just, it’s been wonderful to get another chance to talk to you. You come back here every couple of years and I get a chance to talk to you. And …

Matt Platkin: I’ll come back anytime.

Pam Karlan:  It always just makes me feel so proud of you and of Stanford. So we now have time for a couple of questions from the audience. Are you going to use the mic for them? So folks can hear the questions. Great.

Q1: I’m Gene Mazo. I’m an ’04 alum. So as Matt may know, I’ve been a legal academic for my career and I have spent about half of it teaching at New Jersey’s two law schools. So I’ve taught at Rutgers and at Seton Hall, and I specialize in election law. New Jersey has 12 members of Congress, and the last time either a Democrat or a Republican incumbent lost a primary in New Jersey was 1958. The last time that a state legislator in New Jersey lost a primary was many years ago. In fact, New Jersey has the highest incumbency rate for primary elections of any legislature in the country. You can’t compare New Jersey to other states that run elections in even-numbered years. We’ve got to look at odd numbered years because in New Jersey we run our legislative elections in odd-numbered years in the governor’s election. But we can compare it to Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi which are the other states that do that. And New Jersey has a higher incumbency rate than all of those states as well. Which could mean that the people of New Jersey just love their politicians more than anybody else in the whole country. But no social scientist would think that was true. Could you talk about what, why that is? And what your office has done about that issue now that we’re friends here and not on…

Matt Platkin: Thank you for the, it’s good to see you. I didn’t know you were going to be here. But what is leading to is which some of you may know there, New Jersey until this past spring had a unique ballot design. The only state in the country that had ballots where we structured them based on whether or not you had your local county party endorsement, and it was something called the line or the column depending on which county you’re in and you had you basically if you had the endorsement you ran and we’re very local and we have elections like all the time So you ran with 50 other people who had the endorse —

I’m making up a number but you ran with a lot of other endorsed candidates and then the non-endorsed candidates We’re in a place and I kid you not, that was locally known as Ballot Siberia in many cases. So it’d be like the first candidates would be here and then over here if you could maybe try to vote for this other set of candidates.

So that wasn’t, that isn’t the only reason why we have strong incumbency rates, but that was a big reason why we had strong incumbency rates. In 2020 before I was attorney general, that ballot design was challenged in federal court in two separate cases. The state intervened in one of the cases and was defending the statutes that created that design. Fast forward to 2024, there’s a Senate primary and Andy Kim was running and was not likely to receive many of the county party’s endorsements, and he filed a preliminary injunction application with the federal court with very similar facts as the underlying challenges seeking them to stop … throw out this ballot design for the current Senate election.

With that, he filed an incredible record that, as you said, really showed the impact of this ballot design on protecting incumbents and really meaning that the county parties were picking the elected officials. So look, I’m the Attorney General. I believe attorneys general overwhelmingly should enforce state statutes, even when I wouldn’t necessarily have voted for them in the legislature. That’s not the test for when, whether you defend a statute. I believe that strongly. Otherwise we have a breakdown of our democratic processes, but there are times, and we’ve seen this both at the federal level and at the state level, where attorneys general do have the authority to not defend a statute.

So I chose not to defend the statute. I filed a letter to the court explaining why I was not defending the statute largely because the ballot design scheme had really become divorced through a series of intervening court decisions from the original intent, which was not to create this sort of political control, but also because of how much it undermined, if you believe in AGs should enforce laws because of the trust in the democratic process, a law that undermines that democratic process doesn’t deserve the same measure of deference in my opintion.

So I filed that letter, which was fairly controversial in New Jersey the district court struck down the law, a Third Circuit panel in five days issued a 37-page opinion, agreeing with it, relying in no small part on the letter that we filed. And for the first time in modern New Jersey political history, we had a Senate primary on the Democratic side, weirdly not on the Republican side, though I don’t think that’s a longterm thing.

I think just there were no Republican plaintiffs that did not have, that had block ballots the same way you would have in any other state. And that was a difficult decision. There were some personal elements that made that difficult. But I’ll say this and this is where I think the my Stanford experience really helped me: Because there were times … law school challenges you and makes you think about what you would do in certain situations. And there were times, there have been times in my career where you’ve had to look yourself in the mirror and say, Are you the person you said you’d be if given the chance to do something that’s tough, even when it might come with some personal cost?

That was one of them. And I felt strongly we were right. I felt strongly the record was clear. There was really no attempt to defend the law on the other side. And, ultimately, the courts agreed with us, and I think the state’s better for it. Thank you.

Q2: Hi, Matt. I’m a former litigation attorney in Columbus, Ohio, and I’m also president of our local nonpartisan city council. I had two quick questions for you. The first is: if you weren’t Attorney General of New Jersey, what would you be doing otherwise? Is there a job or a hobby or a passion that you would love to do? And my second question is, how can we encourage honest, kind, decent, non-extreme folks to run for elected office?

Matt Platkin: I guess I can’t say “point guard for the Knicks” on that one, right? I didn’t expect to do this job. Certainly not at this age. I’m the youngest attorney general in the country. It’s not what I thought I’d be doing. I just like I said, I think I would be doing something … I think I would be a lawyer in public service in some way.

And frankly, that’s might be what I’ll be in when my term ends. I just … I really like representing the people of our state and I love state politics. I love state government because it’s a level of government where we’re big enough that when we do something, we can move the needle, but we’re also local enough where I’ve been to every community. I have friends or know people in all corners of our state and it adds a level of meaning and context to the work that we do you that I didn’t quite feel when I was in Washington. That’s not to say there aren’t really, is a need for really smart and talented lawyers in Washington.

I do think post-Bruin we need really smart and talented lawyers litigating gun cases in states that have strong gun laws. And you need to become amateur historians if you’re not already. Cause that is how we litigate these cases now. So I think I would be doing something like that. And then how do you encourage … look this is a really, difficult time to be thinking about entering public service. And I feel badly when I talk to law students now, because I went to law school and President Obama, whatever you think of the politics, President Obama was president. There was a degree of hope in this country. We had just passed the Affordable Care Act, at least for a lot of the country.

Certainly for me, I felt like government was taking on big things and was doing big things. And there was like a revival in that spirit that I think probably hadn’t happened. in many decades. That’s not, regardless of which side of the aisle now, that’s not the environment that law students today are living in. And when I talk to them, a lot of them ask me a version of that question, which is like, why should I go in and do this? And that makes me really sad because government exists to serve the people that we represent. And we can have honest differences about the right way to do that. But it’s become a blood sport.

And the stakes are high. Look, the stakes of this election are high. People have very strong views about the future of this country. And that will trickle down to how states react. But I’ve seen, and the best case I can make is at the, certainly at the state level, but really anywhere: Every big thing that I’ve seen government do, at the end of the day, it’s usually one or two people that are really making it happen.

There’s, I know there’s some big firm folks here, so you guys may be on the other side of this case, but I’ll give you an example. We sued the five largest oil and natural gas companies for climate …  in  a climate deception case and it was a case that you know, several other states had started some cities had and we were really monitoring it in the courts and I wanted to make sure that if we filed it that I felt we had a reasonable chance of success.

It was going to I always feel this way. I’m not elected, so I don’t need to file a case for a press release. I want to make sure if we’re going to invest resources in something that we’re doing something … that we’re not taking resources away from other work that we can win and we can have an impact.

There were like one or two fairly junior lawyers in my department who pushed that case the strongest, all the way up the chain, right up to me. And I’m very proud of that case, and that happens almost on a daily basis. And so it’s easy, I think, to be cynical. That’s … even sometimes I fall victim to that. But that is a cop out, in my opinion. Because we’ve gone through periods, it’s not the first time in this country that we’ve gone through periods that aren’t so hopeful. We had a civil war, and we came through that, in my opinion, because people didn’t give up. And so we need … and, we won the war … but we need people to stay engaged.

And we need people, good people, to come in government. And we need good people to go to state and local government. And I will tell you, there is a huge misallocation of legal talent in this country. It’s again, not to be critical. I started my career in New York, not to be critical of New York and LA and San Francisco and Chicago and DC, but Stanford degrees are way more common in those cities than even they are across the river in New Jersey.

And we need folks to … and we still have 9.3 million people here. And that’s true in every state. They have the populations they serve. And so we need smart people going and serving in those communities and having the impact that I know they can have.

Pam Karlan: So one more question.

Q3: I better make it good. Bob Stern class of ‘69, I think I may have taken the first election law class maybe in the country here at Stanford with Bob Girard. Question: as we all know, New Jersey has a terrible reputation for corruption. The latest case being Robert Menendez.

Matt Platkin: I don’t know what you’re talking about. [Laughter]

Q3: Well, the question is New Jersey any different from the rest of the states, or is there something in the water in New Jersey?

Pam Karlan: Or are you people just better at prosecuting corruption than some other …

Matt Platkin: I think that’s, we’re hoping to prove that part right. I don’t think it’s something in the water. I do think our elements of the political system that I discussed before have made it ripe for corruption. I think the fact that we are so local and frankly, we’re sandwiched between two media markets that are some of the largest in the world. So we have the New York media market on one hand and we have the Philadelphia media market on the other hand. And most of the media attention flows to those two markets and too little of it flows to New Jersey, especially now. The state house press corps. This is not to be critical of them, but the New York Times used to have three people covering New Jersey full time. There may be a dozen people at the Star Ledger. There’s like maybe five or six attorneys in Trenton now. So when you don’t cover state and local government, bad things can happen. Transparency is a disinfectant. I will say I have made it a very strong priority to combat public corruption.

I think that is a moral imperative. I think that the big source of the cynicism that exists in this country today, and we see this both on the ground and we see it in every single public opinion poll that I’ve seen is that people think their country and their leaders are not working for them. Faith in Congress is at an all-time low. The New York Times had a poll last year that asked people what do they think is the biggest threat to American democracy and the number one answer was not Russia or China or social media or whatever it may be or white nationalism. It was ordinary corruption. I do think it’s an imperative to take that on.

We have, ironically, the strongest anti-corruption laws in America, in New Jersey. They’ve gone through degrees of being enforced. I have a team that is dedicated to prosecuting political corruption cases, but I think combating corruption also goes beyond criminal enforcement, though that’s a big piece of it.

And I’ve not been afraid to bring big cases against powerful people if it warrants. Standing up for citizens, residents of our state, regardless of the type of enforcement provision we have and showing people that we can do things like have clean elections and fair elections and giving people some sense that government is working for them is important.

It makes me really sad as somebody who loves New Jersey and who does not think this is a fair reflection of the state that I grew up in and I’m raising my kids in, that we are known for the things that unfortunately too many Americans know us for. And if I’m successful in anything in my life, I hope I can be a small piece of changing that perception.

So no, I don’t think we’re unique. I do think we have some structural ways that have encouraged it. And the last thing I would say is New Jersey has one U. S. Attorney’s Office, one district, and one Attorney General. We don’t have elected prosecutors. Our county prosecutors are all appointed and they report up to me.

They don’t really handle corruption cases. It’s just not the way they’re structured. It’s our state agency that does. And so given the changes in the federal courts that have made prosecuting corruption extremely difficult I think it’s incumbent on states to invest in anti-corruption efforts and not be afraid to hold people accountable. And those cases are hard. They’re hard. And you lose some and you … powerful people don’t…. I can speak personally on this. They don’t like it when you prosecute them …  And they wage campaigns against the people who are doing the work. They threaten them.

They go after them. All of these are things that I personally experienced and my team has experienced. But I sleep very well at night knowing we’re doing what I think is right and that we’re holding accountable people who I believe broke the law because these are not victimless crimes. I started my career, as I said, in local government. I negotiated four state budgets when I was chief counsel of the governor. You skim money off the top from the state…. It’s not like I had an unlimited pot of money to invest in education and healthcare and housing…. That money is being taken from people who need it. And it’s depriving the taxpayers of the honest services that they’re entitled to.

And so I think when we make sure that we’re continuing to aggressively hold folks accountable, that we’re being upfront about that, when we’re investing in offices that do it, we can change, we can have an impact on the state. And I think we’re in the process, for those of you who’ve been following, I think we’re in a bit of a revolutionary period in New Jersey. I think the state is really changing. In a good way, and I hope to see that through for…to be a part of that effort for a while.

Rich Ford: Thanks so much for being on our show. This is Stanford Legal. If you’re enjoying the show, tell a friend and please leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Your feedback helps us improve the show and helps new listeners to find us. I’m Rich Ford for Pam Karlan. See you next time.