Disputed Question: Is the American Presidency a Constitutional Dictatorship?

In partnership with the School of Law, Civitas Institute, and Center for Law and Democracy, the next event in the School of Civic Leadership’s “Disputed Question” series will put Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston in conversation with the eminent legal scholar John Yoo to examine a provocative constitutional issue: whether the modern American presidency is a form of constitutional dictatorship. Moderated by distinguished UT Austin Law professor Sanford Levinson, the discussion will revisit long-standing debates about the scope of executive power in the United States. Drawing on the arguments of Clinton Rossiter’s classic 1948 study Constitutional Dictatorship, the discussion will explore how war powers, foreign policy authority, and decades of expansive congressional delegation have shaped the modern presidency. Together, the speakers will assess whether describing the contemporary American president as a “constitutional dictator” is merely rhetorical—or a descriptively accurate account of an office that may have been designed, from the beginning, to wield extraordinary authority.

RSVP here: https://luma.com/na1a5c5a

John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, senior fellow at the Civitas Institute, and distinguished visiting professor in the School of Civic Leadership. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Professor Yoo has published 11 books and over 100 academic journal articles on national security, constitutional law, international law, and the Supreme Court, and regularly contributes to major editorial pages such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Yoo has served in all three branches of government. He was an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism issues after the 9/11 attacks. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and has been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and federal appeals Judge Laurence Silberman.

William A. Galston is a senior fellow and the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Governance Studies program at Brookings. Prior to January 2006, he was the Saul Stern Professor and acting dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), and executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, co-chaired by former Secretary of Education William Bennett and former Senator Sam Nunn. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as deputy assistant to President Clinton for domestic policy. Galston is the author of nine books and hundreds of articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, Galston was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Galston has appeared on all the principal television networks and is frequently interviewed on NPR. He writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal.

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. He has been a visiting faculty member of the Boston University, Georgetown, New York University, and Yale law schools in the United States and has taught abroad in programs of law in London; Paris; Budapest; Jerusalem; Auckland, New Zealand; and Melbourne, Australia. He has also been a regular visitor at the Harvard Law School since 2004. Levinson is the author of seven books, 450+ articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals–and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.