The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented increase in unilateral lawmaking by governors under each state’s emergency executive power statute. These actions have been met with controversy and a significant amount of resistance. This Note argues that the resistance to COVID-19 rules in the United States may be partially attributable to the way state emergency power statutes concentrate virtually all the power to enact emergency rules...
Executive Power
The President has “two bodies.” One body is personal, temporary, and singular. The other is impersonal, continuous, and composite. American public law reveals different perspectives on how to manage—but cannot escape—this central paradox. Our major disagreements and confusions about presidential power track what we might think of as the fault lines between these two bodies. An array of seemingly disparate debates on topics ranging from...
Article II of the United States Constitution vests “the executive power” in the President. For more than two hundred years, advocates of presidential power have claimed that this phrase was originally understood to include a bundle of national security and foreign affairs authorities. Their efforts have been highly successful. Among constitutional originalists, this so-called “Vesting Clause Thesis” is now conventional wisdom. But it...