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Full-Text Articles in Law
Movement On Removal: An Emerging Consensus On The First Congress, Jed Handelsman Shugerman
Movement On Removal: An Emerging Consensus On The First Congress, Jed Handelsman Shugerman
Faculty Scholarship
What did the “Decision of 1789” decide about presidential removal power, if anything? It turns out that an emerging consensus of scholars agrees that there was not much consensus in the First Congress.
Two more questions follow: Is the “unitary executive theory” based on originalism, and if so, is originalism a reliable method of interpretation based on historical evidence?
The unitary executive theory posits that a president has exclusive and “indefeasible” executive powers (i.e., powers beyond congressional and judicial checks and balances). This panel was an opportunity for unitary executive theorists and their critics to debate recent historical research questioning …
Freehold Offices Vs. 'Despotic Displacement': Why Article Ii 'Executive Power' Did Not Include Removal, Jed Handelsman Shugerman
Freehold Offices Vs. 'Despotic Displacement': Why Article Ii 'Executive Power' Did Not Include Removal, Jed Handelsman Shugerman
Faculty Scholarship
The Roberts Court has relied on an assertion that Article II’s “executive power” implied an “indefeasible” or unconditional presidential removal power. In the wake of growing historical evidence against their theory, unitary executive theorists have fallen back on a claim of a “backdrop” or default removal rule from English and other European monarchies. However, unitary theorists have not provided support for these repeated assertions, while making a remarkable number of errors, especially in the recent “The Executive Power of Removal” (Harvard L. Rev. 2023).
This Article offers an explanation for the difficulty in supporting this historical claim: Because …
The Executive Branch Anticanon, Deborah Pearlstein
The Executive Branch Anticanon, Deborah Pearlstein
Articles
Donald Trump’s presidency has given rise to a raft of concerns not just about the wisdom of particular policy decisions but also about the prospect that executive actions might have troubling longer term “precedential” effects. While critics tend to leave undefined what “precedent” in this context means, existing constitutional structures provide multiple mechanisms by which presidential practice can influence future executive branch conduct: judicial actors rely on practice as gloss on constitutional meaning, executive branch officials rely on past practice in guiding institutional norms of behavior, and elected officials outside the executive branch and the people themselves draw on past …
Presidential Whim, Matthew J. Steilen
Presidential Whim, Matthew J. Steilen
Journal Articles
This article describes a new body of legal literature on the presidency. In contrast to older bodies of writing, which emphasize presidential independence, this body of writing emphasizes the dependence of the executive power, and a set of moral values associated with the office: faith, faithfulness, responsibility, honesty, due care, and professionalism, among others. The article considers prospects for enforcing this vision of the presidency in light of the particular problems posed by the Trump presidency. Many writers have complained of President Trump's leadership style, which is abrupt, reflexive, dissembling, and unilateral. I refer to this as the problem of …
Article Ii Vests Executive Power, Not The Royal Prerogative, Julian Davis Mortenson
Article Ii Vests Executive Power, Not The Royal Prerogative, Julian Davis Mortenson
Articles
Article II of the United States Constitution vests “the executive power” in the President. For more than two hundred years, advocates of presidential power have claimed that this phrase was originally understood to include a bundle of national security and foreign affairs authorities. Their efforts have been highly successful. Among constitutional originalists, this so-called “Vesting Clause Thesis” is now conventional wisdom. But it is also demonstrably wrong. Based on an exhaustive review of the eighteenth-century bookshelf, this Article shows that the ordinary meaning of “executive power” referred unambiguously to a single, discrete, and potent authority: the power to execute law. …
Getting Past The Imperial Presidency, Deborah Pearlstein
Getting Past The Imperial Presidency, Deborah Pearlstein
Articles
In an age in which the “imperial presidency” seems to have reached its apex, perhaps most alarmingly surrounding the use of military force, conventional wisdom remains fixed that constitutional and international law play a negligible role in constraining executive branch decision-making in this realm. Yet as this Article explains, the factual case that supports the conventional view, based largely on highly selected incidents of presidential behavior, is meaningless in any standard empirical sense. Indeed, the canonical listing of presidential decisions to use force without prior authorization feeds a compliance-centered focus on the study of legal constraint rooted in long-since abandoned …
Executive Power And National Security Power, Julian Davis Mortenson, Andrew Kent
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 …
Excavating The Forgotten Suspension Clause, Helen Norton
Excavating The Forgotten Suspension Clause, Helen Norton
Publications
No abstract provided.
Text Of Solicitor Opinions And A Presidential Letter Regarding National Monuments And The Antiquities Act Of 1906, Mark Squillace
Text Of Solicitor Opinions And A Presidential Letter Regarding National Monuments And The Antiquities Act Of 1906, Mark Squillace
Research Data
These five full-text documents are cited in Mark Squillace, The Monumental Legacy of the Antiquities Act of 1906, 37 Ga. L. Rev. 473 (2003), available at http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/508; and/or Mark Squillace, Eric Biber, Nicholas S. Bryner & Sean B. Hecht, Presidents Lack the Authority to Abolish or Diminish National Monuments, 103 Va. L. Rev. Online 55 (2017), http://www.virginialawreview.org/sites/virginialawreview.org/files/Hecht%20PDF.pdf:
- U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of the Solicitor, Opinion of Apr. 20, 1915 (cited in Opinion of January 30, 1935, M-27657).
- U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of the Solicitor, Opinion of June 3, 1924, M-12501, M-12529 (cited …
The President's Faithful Execution Duty, Harold H. Bruff
The President's Faithful Execution Duty, Harold H. Bruff
Publications
No abstract provided.
How Presidents Interpret The Constitution, Harold H. Bruff
How Presidents Interpret The Constitution, Harold H. Bruff
Publications
No abstract provided.
The Dependent Origins Of Independent Agencies: The Interstate Commerce Commission, The Tenure Of Office Act, And The Rise Of Modern Campaign Finance, Jed Handelsman Shugerman
The Dependent Origins Of Independent Agencies: The Interstate Commerce Commission, The Tenure Of Office Act, And The Rise Of Modern Campaign Finance, Jed Handelsman Shugerman
Faculty Scholarship
Independent regulatory agencies are some of the most powerful institutions in the United States, and we think of them today as designed to be insulated from political control. This Article shows that their origins were the opposite: this model first emerged in the late nineteenth century because it offered more political control.
The modern executive's design of unitary presidential control over most offices, alongside "independent" regulatory agencies, took shape in the winter of 1886-1887. Congress repealed the Tenure of Office Act, giving the President the unchecked power to dismiss principal officers and ending the Senate's power to protect those officers. …
Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry : Historical Gloss, The Recognition Power, And Judicial Review, Curtis A. Bradley
Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry : Historical Gloss, The Recognition Power, And Judicial Review, Curtis A. Bradley
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The National Security State: The End Of Separation Of Powers, Michael E. Tigar
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
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
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 …
Federalism As A Safeguard Of The Separation Of Powers, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Federalism As A Safeguard Of The Separation Of Powers, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Faculty Scholarship
States frequently administer federal law, yet scholars have largely overlooked how the practice of cooperative federalism affects the balance of power across the branches of the federal government. This Article explains how states check the federal executive in an era of expansive executive power and how they do so as champions of Congress, both relying on congressionally conferred authority and casting themselves as Congress's faithful agents. By inviting the states to carry out federal law, Congress, whether purposefully or incidentally, counteracts the tendency of statutory ambiguity and broad delegations of authority to enhance federal executive power. When states disagree with …
Presidential Power In Historical Perspective: Reflections' On Calabresi And Yoo's The Unitary Executive, Christopher S. Yoo
Presidential Power In Historical Perspective: Reflections' On Calabresi And Yoo's The Unitary Executive, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
On February 6 and 7, 2009, more than three dozen of the nation’s most distinguished commentators on presidential power gathered in Philadelphia to explore themes raised by a book authored by Steven Calabresi and I co-authored reviewing the history of presidential practices with respect to the unitary executive. The conference honoring our book and the special journal issue bringing together the articles presented there provide a welcome opportunity both to look backwards on the history of our project and to look forwards at the questions yet to be answered.
Raising The Red Flag: The Continued Relevance Of The Japanese Internment In The Post-Hamdi World, Aya Gruber
Raising The Red Flag: The Continued Relevance Of The Japanese Internment In The Post-Hamdi World, Aya Gruber
Publications
In the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the Japanese interment has re-emerged as a topic of serious discourse among legal scholars, politicians, civil libertarians, and society in general. Current national security policies have created concerns that the government has stepped dangerously close to the line crossed by the Roosevelt administration during World War II. Civil libertarians invoke the internment to caution policy-makers against two of the most serious dangers of repressive national security policies: racial decision-making and incarceration without process. Bush defenders advance several arguments in response to internment comparisons. The most conservative is an ardent defense …
The Unitary Executive In The Modern Era, 1945–2004, Christopher S. Yoo, Steven G. Calabresi, Anthony J. Colangelo
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 …
Brief Amici Curiae Of Legal Historians Listed Herein In Support Of The Petitioners, Rasul V. Bush, Nos. 03-334 & 03-343 (U.S. Jan. 14, 2004), James Oldham
U.S. Supreme Court Briefs
No abstract provided.
Judicial Activism: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Arthur D. Hellman
Judicial Activism: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Arthur D. Hellman
Articles
No matter how judges are selected, sooner or later some unfortunate candidate will be labeled a "judicial activist." One has to wonder: Does the term have any identifiable core meaning? Or is it just an all-purpose term of opprobrium, reflecting whatever brand of judicial behavior the speaker regards as particularly pernicious? Implicit in this question are several important issues about the role of courts in our democratic society.
I take my definition from Judge Richard Posner, who describes activist decisions as those that expand judicial power over other branches of the national government or over state governments. Unlike other uses …
Managing The Public Lands: The Authority Of The Executive To Withdraw Lands, David H. Getches
Managing The Public Lands: The Authority Of The Executive To Withdraw Lands, David H. Getches
Publications
No abstract provided.