The Brookhaven Lecture Committee presents a lecture by Peter L. Strauss on The Perils of an Aging Constitution: The Presidency and the Courts at 7:30 pm in the Performance Hall and streaming. Peter L. Strauss, Betts Professor Emeritus at Columbia Law School, has been one of the country’s leading administrative law scholars, responsible over four decades for one of its most respected sets of teaching materials on that subject and the author, inter alia, of Administrative Justice in the United States – a monograph written to introduce foreign lawyers to the eccentricities of American public law. He will speak on the perils posed by our aging constitution in an era of deeply divided government. Well before the Trump administration’s striking claims about the presidency, Presidents claimed constitutional authority to act on their own, as the sole possessors of executive power. These claims were long encouraged by judicial acceptance of both presidential authority and broad statutory delegations, and judicial respect for agency decision-making; yet the Supreme Court has recently been constraining governmental actions on constitutional grounds (or driven by constitutional concerns) that, a decade ago, were marginal at best. President Biden, then, faces both the temptation to act on his own in dealing with a recalcitrant Congress, and the Court’s increasing suspicions. For those interested in exploring some background, Prof. Strauss suggests Peter Shane’s, Democracy’s Chief Executive: Interpreting the Constitution and Defining the Future of the Presidency, and/or an online symposium published in its wake, https://www.yalejreg.com/topic/symposium-shane-democracy-chief-executive/. The symposium captures the book well and presents reactions to it from a wide range of accomplished legal scholars.
