Legal History Commons^™

Becoming The Administrator-In-Chief: Myers And The Progressive Presidency, Andrea Scoseria Katz, Noah A. Roseblum

Scholarship@WashULaw

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has mounted an assault on the administrative state, guided by a particular vision of Article II. According to the Court’s scheme, known as the theory of the unitary executive, all of government’s operations must be housed under one of three branches, with the single head of the executive branch shouldering a unique and personal responsibility for the administration of federal law. The Constitution is thus said to require that the President have expansive authority to supervise or control the government’s many agencies.

Guiding each of the Court’s recent decisions is Myers …

Legislating Against Liberties: Congress And The Constitution In The Aftermath Of War, Harry Blain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How far can a democracy go to protect itself without jeopardizing the liberties upon which democracy depends? This dissertation examines why wartime restrictions on civil liberties outlive their original justifications. Through a comparative historical analysis of five major American wars, it illustrates the decisive role of the U.S. Congress in preserving these restrictions during peacetime. This argument challenges the prevailing consensus in the literature, which identifies wartime executive power as the main threat to postwar freedoms. It also reveals broader narratives of American constitutional development, including the rise and fall of intrusive congressional investigations, the decline of sedition legislation since …

The Forgotten Unitary Executive Power: The Textualist, Originalist, And Functionalist Opinions Clause, Zachary J. Murray

Pace Law Review

This article will analyze the Opinion Clause’s text, its history and intent, and its potential functions as a power. Part II catalogues much of the prior scholarship on the Opinions Clause, which generally fits into two categories: the anti-unitary approach, which argues that a substantive reading of the Vesting Clause renders the Opinions Clause redundant, and the unitary response, which essentially accepts that redundancy. To some extent, both sides miss the mark. The unitary approach misreads the text, assigning great substantive weight to the descriptive Vesting Clause, while assigning descriptive status to the substantive Opinions Clause. The anti-unitary approach, on …

John Quincy Adams Influence On Washington’S Farewell Address: A Critical Examination, Stephen Pierce

Undergraduate Research

John Quincy Adams is seen by the American public today as a failed one-term president. When one starts to see his diplomatic work and his service in Congress, however, he becomes one of the most important figures in American history. The diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis was in 1944 the first historian to suggest that Adams’ early writings influenced Washington’s Farewell Address. He looked through some of Adams’ early published writings and concluded that it was, “Conspicuous among the admonitions of the Farewell Address are: (1) to exalt patriotically the national words, America, American, Americans; (2) to beware of foreign …

Executive Power And National Security Power, Julian Davis Mortenson, Andrew Kent

Book Chapters

The constitutional text governing national security law is full of gaps, oversights, and omissions. In combination with the authorization principle -- which requires all federal actors to identify particularized authority for their actions -- these gaps have often presented an acute dilemma for Presidents charged with defending the nation. Focusing on three periods in American history, this chapter sketches the historical evolution of how the political branches have responded.

First, the early republic. During this period, presidents responded to the authorization dilemma by seeking highly particularized authorization from the two other constitutional branches of government. Throughout the era, presidents’ claims …

The Natural Born Citizen Clause As Originally Understood, Mary Brigid Mcmanamon

Mary Brigid McManamon

Article II of the Constitution requires that the President be a “natural born Citizen.” The phrase is derived from English common law, and the Supreme Court requires examination of that law to ascertain the phrase’s definition. This piece presents the pertinent English sources, combined with statements by early American jurists. Based on a reading of these materials, the article concludes that, in the eyes of the Framers, a presidential candidate must be born within the United States. The article is important because there has been a candidate that “pushed the envelope” on this question in many elections over the last …

Originalism And The Natural Born Citizen Clause, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The enigmatic phrase "natural born citizen" poses a series of problems for contemporary originalism. New originalists, like Justice Scalia, focus on the public meaning of the constitutional text, but the notion of a "natural born citizen" was likely a term of art, derived from the idea of a "natural born subject" in English law--a category that most likely did not extend to persons, like John McCain, who were born outside sovereign territory. But the constitution speaks of "citizens" and not "subjects," introducing uncertainties and ambiguities that might (or might not) make McCain eligible for the presidency.

What was the original …

The Unitary Executive In The Modern Era, 1945–2004, Christopher S. Yoo, Steven G. Calabresi, Anthony J. Colangelo

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the impeachment of President Clinton, there has been renewed debate over whether Congress can create institutions such as special counsels and independent agencies that restrict the president's control over the administration of the law. Initially, debate centered on whether the Constitution rejected the "executive by committee" used by the Articles of Confederation in favor of a "unitary executive," in which all administrative authority is centralized in the president. More recently, the debate has focused on historical practices. Some scholars suggest that independent agencies and special counsels are such established features of the constitutional landscape that any argument in favor …