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The Place Of The Presidency In Historical Time, Robert L. Tsai
The Place Of The Presidency In Historical Time, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay arises from a symposium based on Jack Balkin’s book, The Cycles of Constitutional Time, which argues that America’s constitutional development is marked by patterns of decline and renewal. I contend that the presidency today has become endowed with outsized expectations borne of popular frustrations with a centuries-old document that is desperately in need of updating. As a result, Presidents enjoy imbalanced and dangerous power to initiate legal reform or stymie it. Going forward, three dynamics are worth watching. First, noisy signals coming from performative transformation can obscure the true source and scope of legal changes initiated by a …
Power Transitions In A Troubled Democracy, Peter L. Strauss, Gillian E. Metzger
Power Transitions In A Troubled Democracy, Peter L. Strauss, Gillian E. Metzger
Faculty Scholarship
Written as our contribution to a festschrift for the noted Italian administrative law scholar Marco D’Alberti, this essay addresses transition between Presidents Trump and Biden, in the context of political power transitions in the United States more generally. Although the Trump-Biden transition was marked by extraordinary behaviors and events, we thought even the transition’s mundane elements might prove interesting to those for whom transitions occur in a parliamentary context. There, succession can happen quickly once an election’s results are known, and happens with the new political government immediately formed and in office. The layer of a new administration’s political leadership …