Law Commons^™

The National Security Consequences Of The Major Questions Doctrine, Timothy Meyer, Ganesh Sitaraman

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of the major questions doctrine—the rule that says that in order to delegate to the executive branch the power to resolve a “question of ‘deep economic and political significance’ that is central to [a] statutory scheme,” Congress must do so expressly—threatens to unmake the modern executive’s authority over foreign affairs, especially in matters of national security and interstate conflict. In the twenty-first century, global conflicts increasingly involve economic warfare, rather than (or in addition to) the force of arms.

In the United States, the executive power to levy economic sanctions and engage in other forms of economic warfare …

Presidential Responses To Protest: Lessons Jefferson Davis Never Learned, Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Trade, Redistribution, And The Imperial Presidency, Timothy Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Whose Lands? Which Public?: The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah Britton-Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. …

U.S. War Powers And The Potential Benefits Of Comparativism, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

There is no issue of foreign relations law more important than the allocation of authority over the use of military force. This issue is especially important for the United States given the frequency with which it is involved in military activities abroad. Yet there is significant uncertainty and debate in the United States over this issue — in particular, over whether and to what extent military actions must be authorized by Congress. Because U.S. courts in the modern era have generally declined to review the legality of military actions, disputes over this issue have had to be resolved, as a …

Presidential Control Over International Law, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

Presidents have come to dominate the making, interpretation, and termination of international law for the United States. Often without specific congressional concurrence, and sometimes even when it is likely that Congress would disagree, the President has developed the authority to:

(a) make a vast array of international obligations for the United States, through both written agreements and the development of customary international law;

(b) make increasingly consequential political commitments for the United States on practically any topic;

(c) interpret these obligations and commitments; and

(d) terminate or withdraw from these obligations and commitments.

While others have examined pieces of this …

Signing Statements And Presidentializing Legislative History, John De Figueiredo, Edward H. Stiglitz

Faculty Scholarship

Presidents often attach statements to the bills they sign into law, purporting to celebrate, construe, or object to provisions in the statute. Though long a feature of U.S. lawmaking, the President has avowedly attempted to use these signing statements as tool of strategic influence over judicial decision making since the 1980s — as a way of creating “presidential legislative history” to supplement and, at times, supplant the traditional congressional legislative history conventionally used by the courts to interpret statutes. In this Article, we examine a novel dataset of judicial opinion citations to presidential signing statements to conduct the most comprehensive …

Presidential War Powers As A Two-Level Dynamic: International Law, Domestic Law, And Practice-Based Legal Change, Curtis A. Bradley, Jean Galbraith

Faculty Scholarship

There is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the United Nations Charter or specific Security Council resolutions authorize nations to use force abroad, and there is a rich literature on the circumstances under which the U.S. Constitution and statutory law allows the President to use force abroad. These are largely separate areas of scholarship, addressing what are generally perceived to be two distinct levels of legal doctrine. This Article, by contrast, considers these two levels of doctrine together as they relate to the United States. In doing so, it makes three main contributions. First, it demonstrates striking parallels …

Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry : Historical Gloss, The Recognition Power, And Judicial Review, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry, Curtis A. Bradley, Carlos M. Vazquez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Quitting In Protest: A Theory Of Presidential Policy Making And Agency Response, Charles M. Cameron, John M. De Figueiredo, David E. Lewis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the effects of centralized presidential policy-making, implemented through unilateral executive action, on the willingness of bureaucrats to exert effort and stay in the government. Extending models in organizational economics, we show that policy initiative by the president is a substitute for initiative by civil servants. Yet, total effort is enhanced when both work. Presidential centralization of policy often impels policy-oriented bureaucrats ("zealots") to quit rather than implement presidential policies they dislike. Those most likely to quit are a range of moderate bureaucrats. More extreme bureaucrats may be willing to wait out an opposition president in the hope …

U.S. Executive Branch Patent Policy, Global And Domestic, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Supplying Compliance: Why And When The United States Complies With Wto Rulings, Rachel Brewster, Adam Chilton

Faculty Scholarship

In studies of compliance with international law, the focus is usually on the “demand side” – that is, how to increase the pressure on the state to comply. Less attention has been paid, however, to the consequences of the “supply side” – who within the state is responsible for the compliance. This Article is the first study to systematically address the issue of how different actors within the United States government alter national policy in response to the violations of international law. The Article does so by examining cases initiated under the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU). …

The National Security State: The End Of Separation Of Powers, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Presidential Power, Historical Practice, And Legal Constraint, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

The scope of the President’s legal authority is determined in part by historical practice. This Essay aims to better understand how such practice-based law might operate as a constraint on the presidency. Some scholars have suggested that presidential authority has become “unbounded” by law, and is now governed only or primarily by politics. At the same time, there has been growing skepticism about the ability of the familiar political checks on presidential power to work in any systematic or reliable fashion. Skepticism about law’s potential to constrain in this context is heightened by the customary nature of much of what …

Constitutional Backdrops, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution is often said to leave important questions unanswered. These include, for example, the existence of a congressional contempt power or an executive removal power, the role of stare decisis, and the scope of state sovereign immunity. Bereft of clear text, many scholars have sought answers to such questions in Founding-era history. But why should the historical answers be valid today, if they were never codified in the Constitution's text?

This Article describes a category of legal rules that weren't adopted in the text, expressly or implicitly, but which nonetheless have continuing legal force under the written Constitution. These …

Responses To The Ten Questions, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Clear Statement Rules And Executive War Powers, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

This article is based on a presentation at the Annual Federalist Society National Student Symposium on Law and Public Policy that explored the theme of separation of powers in American constitutionalism.

The scope of the President’s independent war powers is notoriously unclear, and courts are understandably reluctant to issue constitutional rulings that might deprive the federal government as a whole of the flexibility needed to respond to crises. As a result, courts often look for signs that Congress has either supported or opposed the President’s actions and rest their decisions on statutory grounds. There have been both liberal and conservative …

Military Commissions And Terrorist Enemy Combatants, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Executive And The Avoidance Canon, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Parsing The Commander In Chief Power: Three Distinctions, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Presidential Signing Statements And Executive Power, Curtis A. Bradley, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

A recent debate about the Bush administration's use of presidential signing statements has raised questions about their function, legality, and value. We argue that presidential signing statements are legal and that they provide a useful way for the president to disclose his views about the meaning and constitutionality of legislation. In addition, basic tenets of positive political theory suggest that signing statements do not undermine the separation of powers or the legislative process and that, under certain circumstances, they can provide relevant evidence of statutory meaning. Although President Bush has raised many more constitutional challenges within his signing statements than …

Congressional Authorization And The War On Terrorism, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents a framework for interpreting Congress's September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the central statutory enactment related to the war on terrorism. Although both constitutional theory and constitutional practice suggest that the validity of presidential wartime actions depends to a significant degree on their relationship to congressional authorization, the meaning and implications of the AUMF have received little attention in the academic debates over the war on terrorism. The framework presented in this Article builds on the analysis in the Supreme Court's plurality opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which devoted significant attention to the …

Principles To Guide The Office Of Legal Counsel, Walter E. Dellinger Iii, Christopher H. Schroeder, Dawn Johnsen, Randolph Moss, Joseph Guerra, Beth Nolan, Todd Peterson, Cornelia Pillar

Faculty Scholarship

Former members of Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC") in the Department of Justice offer guidance for their successors. Among the document's recommendations are suggestions that the OLC "provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration’s pursuit of desired policies;" and "publicly disclose its written legal opinions in a timely manner, absent strong reasons for delay or nondisclosure."

Executive Power Essentialism And Foreign Affairs, Curtis A. Bradley, Martin S. Flaherty

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

‘Chevron’ Deference And Foreign Affairs, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Learning The Wrong Lessons From History: Why There Must Be An Independant Counsel Law, Erwin Chemerinsky

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Political And Constitutional Review Of United States V. Nixon, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

This comparison of United States v. Nixon and the Pentagon Papers case finds the greatest similarity and significance shared by the two cases was the anti-climactic nature of their conclusions. While both cases concerned constitutional questions of the highest order, centered around the scope of the executive power, both cases were drawn on such narrow grounds that there was hardly any effect on constitutional law doctrine.

President Nixon: Toughing It Out With The Law, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines President Nixon's handling of the Watergate scandal, arguing that Nixon's stance of "toughing it out with the law" was a common ploy used during his administration to extend the breadth of the issue in question. This expansion deflected attention away from the issue of the Constitutional limits on a president's power and was used to justify a broad spectrum of powers Nixon exercised during his presidency.

Political Questions: The Judicial Check On The Executive, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.