Separation of Powers
De-judicialization Strategies
Constitutions have long been understood to empower courts. We argue, however, that constitutions can also be used to de-judicialize politics. We focus on the de-judicialization strategy of adding detailed provisions to U.S. state constitutions, and demonstrate that it has been employed throughout U.S. history and is still in use today.
Tar Heel Constitutionalism: The New Judicial Federalism in North Carolina
Like many other state constitutions, the North Carolina Constitution contains unique provisions guaranteeing individual rights not present in the U.S. Constitution. This Essay explores the extent to which political and civil rights in the North Carolina Constitution have been enforced by the state supreme court in modern times.
The “Bounds” of Moore: Pluralism and State Judicial Review
This Essay examines a potential version of the “independent state legislature theory” (ISLT) that, were it adopted, could require states to adopt particular interpretive methods for state laws regarding federal elections. That ISLT variant, however, has no basis in history, federalism, or democracy.
The Right to Amend State Constitutions
This Essay explores the people’s right to amend state constitutions and threats to that right today. It explains how democratic proportionality review can help courts distinguish unconstitutional infringement of the right from legitimate regulation. More broadly, the Essay considers the distinctive state constitutional architecture that popular amendment illuminates.
The Insidious War Powers Status Quo
This Essay highlights two features of modern war powers that hide from public view decisions that take the country to war: the executive branch’s exploitation of interpretive ambiguity to defend unilateral presidential authority, and its dispersal of the power to use force to the outer limbs of the bureaucracy.
War Powers Reform: A Skeptical View
Debates about war powers focus too much on legal checks and on the President’s power to start wars. Congressional checks before and during crises work better than many reformists suppose, and there are ways to improve Congress’s political checking without substantial legal reform.
Deciphering the Commander-in-Chief Clause
At the Founding, commanders in chief (CINCs) enjoyed neither sole nor supreme military authority, each military branch having many chief commanders. Thus, most presidential authority over the military stemmed from the rest of Article II, not the CINC Clause. Consequently, Congress enjoys sweeping authority over the military and its operations.
Separation-of-Powers Avoidance
Federal judges are not mere arbiters of the separation of powers. Whenever they adjudicate cases, judicial power is implicated. This Article documents how this phenomenon impacts doctrine concerning the structural constitution and contends that we ought to be wary when this doctrine travels outside the courtroom.
The Adjudicative State
This Feature identifies a foundational problem in modern administrative law. It argues that the Supreme Court’s dual commitments to unitary executive theory and separation-of-powers literalism are in deep conflict when it comes to agency courts. Recognizing this conflict advances debates about how the Roberts Court is transforming the administrative state.
The Separation-of-Powers Counterrevolution
The Article traces modern separation-of-powers jurisprudence to the Court’s reaction to Reconstruction. Converting Lost Cause dogma into the language of constitutional law, the Court sparked a counterrevolution that obscures, and eclipses, a more normatively compelling conception—one that locates in representative institutions authority to constitute the separation of powers by statute.
Subordination and Separation of Powers
Liberty, accountability, and other values advanced by separation-of-powers tools such as the “power of the purse” come with real-world costs targeted at marginalized groups. Scholars and courts should account for such skewed impacts by including antisubordination among the values they consider in analyzing separation-of-powers questions.
Ending Bogus Immigration Emergencies
Justice Jackson warned in Korematsu that the decision was “a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Seventy-five years later, President Trump has picked up that doctrinal weapon. This Essay identifies three reforms that would unload it.
Manufactured Emergencies
As America goes through a democratic decline, a new problem rears its head: the manufactured crisis. To stem further degradation of democratic norms, this Essay calls for judges to reject unjustified assertions of unilateral power by carefully reviewing facts and refusing to tolerate lies.
The Separation of National Security Powers: Lessons from the Second Congress
Can Congress reclaim a meaningful institutional role in supervising some of the broad national security powers it has delegated to the executive branch? This Essay argues that Congress can do so and explains how an obscure statute—the Calling Forth Act of 1792—provides a roadmap for how it should.
The Statutory Separation of Powers
Separation of powers operates as an underappreciated structural principle in subconstitutional domains. Using the relationship between federal energy agencies as its primary case study, this Article argues that Congress creates statutory schemes of separation, checks, and balances in its delegations to administrative agencies operating within discrete policy domains.
Building Political Will for Accountable, Equitable Trade Policy Making
Trade policy is at an inflection point. Because trade deals are often negotiated in secret and without congressional input, the public lacks the information necessary to hold the executive branch accountable. This Comment therefore proposes that Congress establish a nonpartisan, expert body to produce public-facing trade analysis.
Separation of Prosecutors
The decentralized structure of the federal criminal-justice system has generated significant criticism. This Note offers a novel explanation and defense of this structure, arguing that decentralization is a feature of congressional design, not a bug of congressional abdication.
Presidential Power to Terminate International Agreements
Can President Trump unilaterally withdraw the United States from any and all international agreements to which the United States is a party? This Essay argues that constitutional, functional, and comparative-law considerations dictate that the answer is a resounding “no.”
Congressional Power over Office Creation
This Note argues that the Constitution gives Congress exclusive authority over office creation. This exclusive power has important and surprising implications for a series of live constitutional questions, such as the constitutionality of qualifications clauses, for-cause removal provisions, and temporary appointments, as well as the employee/officer distinction.
Reviving the Power of the Purse: Appropriations Clause Litigation and National Security Law
The President is increasingly the epicenter of national security decision making, a development in tension with the shared war-making power in the Constitution. This Note explores how Congress could use an Appropriations Clause lawsuit to reassert its constitutional prerogative against the President’s unilateral national security actions.