Law Commons^™

The Executive Power Of Constitutional Interpretation, Gary S. Lawson, Christopher D. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

It is emphatically the province and duty of the President to say what the law is, including the law embodied in the Federal Constitution. In the mid-1980s, a claim of this sort would have been received by the legal intelligentsia with some combination of bemusement and outrage. One would have heard, loudly and often, that it is the special province of the federal courts to declare the meaning of the Constitution, -Lnd that any attempt to question the judiciary's supreme interpretative role, especially in favor of an interpretative role for the President, was an attack on the rule of law …