Jake Lehman, fresh out of law school at NYU, finds himself swept into the political intrigue and moral dilemmas plaguing the nation’s capital when he lands in Washington, DC, for a clerkship with the venerable Supreme Court Justice White. As he begins falling for a fellow clerk—a brilliant and gorgeous Rhodes scholar from Stanford—a political scandal erupts, implicating the president and raising questions of Justice White’s bias toward the case. Set in America’s near future, Recusal provides an inside look into presidential pardons, censorship, and recusal issues, drawing on current events to show the gray spaces within judicial ethics.

Jake Lehman and his wife, Sydney, have left Washington D.C. for a fresh start in San Francisco. Their legal careers are on the rise, but so are tensions between them as they continually find themselves on opposing sides of cases concerning judicial ethics and gender equality. Their conflicting views on the topic―coupled with growing career obligations, social pressures, and constant travel―come to a head when both Jake and Sydney are recommended for a Supreme Court seat. With rising pressure threatening to divide the Lehmans, an innocent encounter is misconstrued by prying eyes and puts their relationship and Jake’s career in jeopardy. Can Jake and Sydney’s relationship withstand the intricacies of these cases and the complications of their careers?