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The article discusses a presumption of regularity in America's judicial review of the executive branch, and it mentions U.S. Supreme Court (Supreme Court) cases and a travel ban involving majority-Muslim nations which was issued by American President Donald Trump's Administration. According to the article, the Supreme Court has used the phrase presumption of regularity in 59 legal cases between 1900 and 2018. Presumptions involving prosecutors and administrative agencies are assessed.

Much has been written about George Washington as a presidential leader, but little attention has been given to one important aspect of the first president's administration: his role in funding and constructing the nation's new capital city in the District of Columbia. This article highlights Washington's involvement in the creation of the Federal City by focusing on the choices he faced and decisions he made regarding Washington, DC during the last six months he was in office and showing that in terms of this facet of his presidency, he was truly a hands-on leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of power in public law in relation to the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and it mentions American constitutionalism and constraints in state power, as well as U.S. constitutional law. Presidential (executive) power, federalism, and a separation of powers doctrine are examined, as well as the U.S. Congress' powers and the efforts to create a constitutional balance in America. Government institutions and constitutional structure are assessed.

How does the institutional design of a state's bureaucracy affect foreign policy? We argue that institutions can moderate bureaucrats' incentives to act in accordance with an Executive's diplomatic preferences. Where the Executive can influence budgets or career paths, bureaucrats face incentives to adopt her diplomatic goals as their own. Where agencies are shielded from Executive influence, bureaucrats are free to act independently in a bid to enhance their autonomy and their reputation for competence. To test these expectations, we develop a new measure of bureaucratic independence for the 15 aid-giving agencies in the US government. We analyze how independence affects foreign aid allocation patterns over the 1999-2010 period. We find that in 'dependent' agencies, foreign aid flows track the diplomatic objectives of the president. In 'independent' agencies, aid flows appear less responsive to presidential priorities and more responsive to indicators of need in the recipient country. Our results highlight limits on the diplomatic use of foreign aid and emphasize the importance of domestic institutional design. Our findings yield insight into a broad range of policy domains-including international finance, immigration, and the application of economic sanctions-where multiple government agencies are in charge of implementing foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congressional delegation choices are widely studied, but scholars have overlooked the states as an inherent part of this process. How do members of Congress with state constituents delegate responsibility to the states? This article incorporates states and legislators with state-based interests in a theory of intergovernmental delegation and argues that members of Congress consider their relationship with their state government vis-à-vis their connection with the national executive branch as they make intergovernmental delegation choices. This theory is tested against current explanations of decentralization: Republican devolution, average partisan congruence between Congress and the states, and policy type using a novel data set spanning over 30 years, 30,000 provisions, and 197 significant laws. Not only is support for the theory of intergovernmental delegation found, but alternative explanations fail to explain the degree of responsibility delegated to the states in national law, demonstrating the importance of national and state political contexts on delegation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the scope of U.S. executive power as of 2015, and it mentions America's constitutional history and a war powers resolution in relation to U.S. national security. America's Constitution and several former U.S. presidents such as George W. Bush are addressed, as well as congressional authorization for wars. American constitutional laws and statutes are examined, along with U.S. presidential authority, justiciability, and a separation of powers doctrine.

The defining feature of foreign relations law is that it is distinct from domestic law. Courts have recognized that foreign affairs are political by their nature and thus unsuited to adjudication, that state and local involvement is inappropriate in foreign affairs, and that the President has the lead role in foreign policymaking. In other words, they have said that foreign relations are exceptional. But foreign relations exceptionalism -- the belief that legal issues arising from foreign relations are functionally, doctrinally, and even methodologically distinct from those arising in domestic policy -- was not always the prevailing view. In the early twentieth century, a revolution took place in foreign relations law. Under the intellectual leadership of Justice Sutherland, the Supreme Court adopted the idea that foreign affairs are an exceptional sphere of policymaking, separate from domestic law and best suited to exclusively federal, and primarily executive, control. The exceptionalist approach has dominated foreign relations law since that time, but it has always had questionable foundations. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a second revolution in foreign relations law, one whose scope and significance rival the Sutherland revolution, but one that has gone largely unrecognized. Over the last twenty-five years, the Supreme Court has increasingly rejected the idea that foreign affairs are different from domestic affairs. Instead, it has started treating foreign relations issues as if they were run-of-the-mill domestic policy issues, suitable for judicial review and governed by ordinary separation of powers and statutory interpretation principles. This "normalization" of foreign relations law has taken place in three waves. It began with the end of the Cold War and the rise of globalization in the 1990s. It continued -- counterintuitively -- during the war on terror, despite the strong case for exceptionalism in a time of exigency. And it has proceeded, during the Roberts Court, to undermine justiciability, federalism, and executive dominance -- the very heart of exceptionalism. This Article documents the normalization of foreign relations law over the last twenty-five years. It demonstrates how normalization can be applied to a wide variety of doctrines and debates in foreign relations law, ranging from the proper interpretation of Youngstown to the applicability of administrative law doctrines in foreign affairs to reforms in the foreign sovereign immunity and state secrets regimes. Ultimately, this Article argues that courts and scholars should embrace normalization as the new paradigm for foreign relations law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Essay argues that there are two unappreciated aspects of U.S. constitutional design that have contributed to our country's success. The first is the fact that the United States is divided into fifty rather than four states. This greatly strengthens the national government and renders secession almost impossible. The second is the formidable set of checks and balances set up on presidential power that makes it impossible for U.S. presidents to become dictators. The fact that thirty-nine of the fifty state governors are elected in off-year or midterm elections, elections in which the incumbent president's party almost always loses ground to the opposition, greatly limits U.S. presidential power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the legal and political arguments of those who support an expansive interpretation of US executive power in the face of threats to the state, taking a comparative historical perspective. It discusses the rationale for this approach by locating its historical origins in international and American jurisprudence, thereby placing them in a modern context. Attention is paid to the points made by various legal representatives of the Bush administration such as John Choon Yoo and Jay S. Bybee. Their views on an expansive response to state emergencies are based on a reading of executive power that informs the Bush administration's approach to law between 2001 and 2008. But this paper goes further in arguing that a common political-juridical ground exists between various critics of the Bush administration, and those who formulated the policies of torture and rendition. This common ground on the subject of executive power in response to emergency lies primarily in the examination of the state of exception examined by Giorgio Agamben. This approach has various implications as to the general exercise of power by the executive in a democratic system. Legem non habet necessitas. Necessity knows no law. Augustine, Soliloquium, 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a message submitted to Congress on January 22, 1807, President Jefferson called attention to activities by a combination of private individuals who had endangered the nation. Admitting that a mixture of rumors and suspicions made it difficult to determine the actual facts, he nevertheless chose to identify Aaron Burr as the principal actor 'whose guilt is placed beyond question.' In advance of a trial, submission and evaluation of evidence, and final verdict by a court, Jefferson publicly found Burr guilty of treasonous conduct punishable by hanging. What prompted Jefferson to make this accusation and what constitutional and legal violations occurred in his pursuit of Burr? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint of the article "War, Depression, and the Presidency, 1933-50," by Clinton Rossiter, which appeared in volume 17, number 4 of the journal in December 1950. The article discusses the U.S.'s Great Depression, World War II in the U.S. and American executive, or presidential, and emergency powers from 1933 through 1950. An overview of the relationship between the U.S. Congress and the president, including the constitutional nature of the relationship and Congress's relationship with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is provided.

This article gives an account of late medieval theories and practices of emergency powers. More particularly, it examines the relation between emergency powers and constitutional change. It thus seeks to explain how, in the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, European rulers began using their emergency powers to gradually expand their fiscal and legislative competences at the expense of local authorities and the church. As is demonstrated in this article, it was essentially the normalization of emergency powers that made the transition towards a more centralized government possible. This can be explained by a combination of factors, including the government's claim to an exclusive right to judge what constituted a public necessity, the new focus on prevention and preparation for future necessities, and the increasing identification of necessity with more general claims to 'public utility' and the 'common welfare'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliamentary oversight of the military constitutes an important element of the civilian control of the armed forces. However, the strength of parliaments in this realm varies greatly across democracies and little is known about the sources of this variation. We propose an explanation for one key aspect of this variation: why does parliament enjoy veto power over military deployments in some democracies but not in others? Our analysis of data from forty-nine democracies around the world suggests that at least three factors account for parliamentary strength or weakness in this realm: the external threat to which a country is exposed, its constitutional tradition, and the experience of severe military failure in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most political scientists assume that American presidents seek to optimize their chances of reelection and to maximize their policy preferences in strategic negotiations with their rivals. Presidents, however, have also been pressed throughout history to restrain their self-aggrandizing aims when confronted with what they take to be exigencies of governance. This article examines the governing challenges met by presidents of the early national and antebellum periods, and argues that the distinctive conditions of governance that defined the pre-Civil War polity motivated a pattern of unionist presidential restraint, prompting presidents to refrain from direct applications of federal coercion and to balance the interests of geographic sections of the Union. Presidents' preoccupation with unionism, this article argues, was ever present in this period. The article examines a diverse set of case studies to make this argument and concludes with a discussion of how changes wrought by the Civil War led to the emergence of new patterns of restraint exercised by subsequent generations of American presidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the theory of presidential representation by examining its development from 1800 to 1864. In particular, it returns to the critics of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln and presents new evidence that the concept of presidential representation not only remained contested throughout this period but also grew more entangled with rival claims of representation and alternative arguments for executive power. By exploring the early development of the theory of presidential representation, the article contributes to the ongoing scholarly task of classifying arguments about the foundations of executive power and attempts to link literatures regarding the constitutional and political sources of presidential power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Richard Neustadt, scholarship on the presidency tends to focus on presidents as single-minded seekers of political power. But, precisely because of the grandness of their political stage, presidents may, in fact, have constitutional ambitions concerning not how much power they will have but how they will wield their constitutional powers. James Madison's presidency provides an important case study of a president's constitutional ambitions. Entering office with constitutional concerns about the power of the presidency relative to the other branches, Madison used his own presidency and especially the War of 1812 to model a new type of constitutional office that he thought would fit better in the system of the separation of powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often treated as a unified concept with a single definition, the presidential mandate actually encompasses multiple definitions, each connected to distinct ideas about democracy and presidential leadership. This article looks at how and when modern presidents have used mandate rhetoric and seeks to explain changes in presidential mandate-claiming patterns. Using an original dataset of 1,467 presidential communications from 1933 through 2009, I find that after 1969presidents became more likely to use election results to justify their actions. However, they also became less likely to emphasize the magnitude of the election result, focusing their mandate rhetoric instead on campaign promises and distinctions between candidates and parties. Evidence suggests that this shift is the result of a combination of several factors: changes to the presidential nomination system, polarized party politics, and an overall decline in presidential approval ratings. Based on this research, I conclude that ideas about the presidential mandate are closely connected with the political conditions and challenges facing presidents. As the place of the presidency has shifted in American politics, the ways in which presidents interpret and communicate about elections have also changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enforcement of law is at the core of the President's constitutional duty to "take Care" that the laws are faithfully executed, and it is a primary mechanism for effecting national regulatory policy. Yet questions about how presidents oversee agency enforcement activity have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This Article provides a positive account of the President's role in administrative enforcement, explores why presidential enforcement has taken the shape it has, and examines the bounds of the President's enforcement power. It demonstrates that presidential involvement in agency enforcement, though extensive, has been ad hoc, crisis-driven, and frequently opaque. The Article thus reveals the need for institutional design reforms--namely more coordination across agencies and greater disclosure of enforcement policy. The seeds for such reforms can be found in several recent efforts that have yet to be made systematic. Concerns about politicization of law enforcement should not override the considerable benefits that would derive. Rather, by acknowledging the President's role in, and responsibility for, enforcement, we can better ensure the structure and transparency that promote appropriate presidential influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the passive-aggressive nature of executive power in America as of August 2013, focusing on the legal aspects of incidents in which the executive branch in the U.S. refuses to enforce the nation's laws regarding issues such as drugs, deportation, and the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). State death penalty laws and executions are mentioned, as well as the U.S. Congress' passage of the National Maximum Speed Law in 1974. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is examined.

An essay is presented on equal protection and the executive branch in America as of August 2013, focusing on the U.S. Congress, the Thirteenth Amendment to the nation's Constitution, and efforts to restrict racial discrimination in the U.S. The legal rights of African Americans are addressed, along with America's Reconstruction and the election of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Republicans and Democrats in the 1800s are examined, along with popular votes and the electoral college.

An essay is presented on former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, his singing of the Emancipation Proclamation (EP), and executive power in America as of August 2013. An analysis is provided regarding Lincoln's constitutional authority to issue the EP during the 19th century. The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is mentioned, along with a separation of powers and the Take Care Clause in the U.S. Constitution is examined.

The article discusses executive power in the U.S. in relation to former American President Abraham Lincoln and motion picture director Steven Spielberg's film "Lincoln" which deals with then-U.S. President Lincoln's political maneuverings which were designed to save the union and abolish slavery. Actor Daniel Day-Lewis' portrayal of American President Lincoln is mentioned, along with then-U.S. President George W. Bush's role in the liberation of the Iraqi people from a reported tyranny.

Republican thinkers normally have considered prerogative powers natural and necessary to a state's survival. Yet Americans are suspicious of these powers, despite their frequent use. This paper draws a consequential distinction between the legitimacy of prerogative as such and the dangers of its use. Employing the Roman dictatorship to illustrate the stakes, I demonstrate that, while the Romans were cautious with the Dictatorship, they embraced its legitimacy in a broader context of a self-consciously flexible government and a tradition of innovation. This serves as a vivid contrast with contemporary American perceptions of the sources of constitutional stability. I argue that unwarranted suspicion of flexible government plays an important role in misperceptions about the legitimacy of prerogative power in constitutional regimes. The inevitable dangers of prerogative in action do not suffice to demonstrate its illegitimacy as an institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theodore Roosevelt's trust policy has been viewed as “progressive” by his contemporaries, dictated by big business by the New Left, and as a precursor to autonomous institutional development most recently. This thesis will instead analyze Roosevelt's actions through a pragmatic lens. Roosevelt's first legislative action in relation to the trusts was to create the Bureau of Corporations. Whilst seemingly ushering in transparency in business affairs through its reporting function, Roosevelt secured executive jurisdiction over publicly circulating its findings, paving the way for private, state-corporate cooperation. Obtaining sensitive information through the promise of discretion, Roosevelt held an implicit leverage over companies, allowing him to threaten to publicize illegalities if they refused to abandon them. The Bureau became a forum for closed-door agreements which achieved tangible amelioration of practice, whilst minimizing the damage entailed by a public airing of corporate America's dirty laundry. I will analyze several Bureau investigations and illustrate the learning curve by which Roosevelt and big business came to an agreement over the parameters of cooperation. Mired by mixed signals from both sides during its early investigations, the emergence of dialectical negotiations over corporate practice and the extent of government-induced public scrutiny came to embody a fledgling cooperative process. These investigations illustrate the pragmatic means by which Roosevelt pursued a conservative, yet effective, reigning in of big business power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores whether U.S. Presidents shape and control federal bureaucracy by considering the actions of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) during the administrations of U.S. Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The authors use a qualitative approach to explore the responsiveness of the FHA to presidential and congressional pressures, decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, and lobbying interests. The FHA was created to insure mortgages, but from its inception, had long practiced a policy of racial segregation by enforcing a restrictive covenant policy on mortgage offerings and denying funding to African Americans, in stark contrast to the racial policies forwarded by Truman.

How did the signing statements of the modern presidency before Watergate shape the development of the tool and contribute to its institutionalization? A content analysis of the 626 signing statements from 1933 to 1974 shows that the Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon administrations set important precedents for the modern constitutional use of the tool by protecting the institution from legislative vetoes and perceived encroachments in regard to foreign affairs and executive privilege. The results reveal that the constitutional logic required for the growth of challenges is rooted in this era and that Watergate served to amplify a trend that was already in motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]