Lederman and Purcell to Lead ICH Seminar on War Powers

[We are moving this announcement up as the deadline of September 15 is approaching.]

The Institute for Constitutional History has announced another Robert H. Smith seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty.  This one is “Modern Constitutional War Powers.”  One of the instructors is my colleague Martin S. Lederman, an Associate Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010, and an Attorney Advisor in OLC from 1994-2002.  The other is Edward A. Purcell, Jr., the Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor at New York Law School and one of the nation's foremost authorities on the history of the United States Supreme Court and the federal judicial system.  He is the author of several books, including Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise: A Historical Inquiry (Yale University Press, 2007), and Brandeis and the Progressive Constitution: Erie, the Judicial Power, and the Politics of the Federal Courts in Twentieth-Century America (Yale University Press, 2000).

The ICH folks explain:

The six-week seminar concerns the evolution of the distribution of war powers from the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the present day.  The Founders endeavored to create a federal system in which a separation and blending of powers would make the legislature the preeminent source of military authority and thus prevent the executive from unilaterally entangling the nation in costly belligerent adventures.  Conventional wisdom has it that practical developments over the past 100 years-most significantly, the creation of a powerful standing army and intelligence establishment, the development of nuclear weapons, and the emergence of a much more robust role for the United States as a superpower responsible for the defense of Europe and other allies in a post-nuclear age-have rendered the original constitutional design obsolete, such that Congress and the courts have largely ceded war-making authority to an all-powerful, virtually unchecked President.  In this interdisciplinary course, using conventional legal materials as well as recent historical and political science accounts of the distribution of war powers, we will examine whether and to what extent this conventional account is accurate, and will more broadly discuss whether the current balance of powers ensures sufficient checks on misguided adventurism and abuse of individual liberties.

The seminars will take place from 3:00 to 5:00 at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York City on the following Wednesday afternoons:October 16, 23, 30, November 6, 13, 20.  There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own.

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