Guarding Against the Authoritarian Executive: The Effectiveness of Legal Constraints on U.S. Presidential Power

Thursday, May 12, 2022
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
(Pacific)

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Speaker: 
  • Deborah Pearlstein

For spring quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

REGISTRATION

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

                                                                                           

About the Event: As constitutional democracies in the United States and around the world struggle to cope with a rising wave of authoritarian challenges, many pro-democracy scholars and advocates in the United States have looked to law reform as a means of bolstering substantive and structural checks on executive power - from anti-corruption measures to limits on the President’s ability to invoke emergency authorities or deploy military force. But these reform efforts arise against a wholly unsettled debate about the function and effectiveness of existing institutional and legal checks, many of which proved deeply vulnerable to evasion during the presidency of Donald Trump.  Using the example of domestic and international laws designed to regulate presidential recourse to military force, Pearlstein will discuss her findings on the operation of existing legal constraints inside the executive branch, and suggest broader lessons for calibrating our understanding of law’s ability to constrain the impulses of authoritarian leaders.

About the Speaker: Deborah Pearlstein is Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Co-Director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.  Her work on national security and structural constraints on state power has been the subject of repeated testimony before Congress from war powers to executive branch oversight, and she today serves on the U.S. State Department Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, an expert board that helps ensure the timely declassification and publication of government records surrounding major events in U.S. foreign policy. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Professor Pearlstein clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, then for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before embarking on a career in law, Pearlstein served in the White House from 1993 to 1995 as a Senior Editor and Speechwriter for President Clinton.