presidential powers — Roundtable — Columbia Undergraduate Law Review

Roundtable

Our Roundtable Discussion initiative was created in the Spring of 2019 to provide a new dimension to the legal research and discourse that the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review aims to promote. In Fall of 2020, CULR began its first collaborative Roundtable series with the Cambridge University Law Society’s Per Incuriam. In Spring 2021, CULR began collaborating on Roundtable with the Penn Undergraduate Law Journal (PULJ).

For each roundtable discussion, CULR staff writers are asked to respond to a prompt or issue from their own perspective. With various voices engaged in the discussion of a single legal issue, Roundtable highlights the multi-faceted nature of law in a digestible and accessible way.

Roundtable features original pieces written and edited by our Roundtable staff at Columbia. They are not representative of any views held by the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review Editorial Board.

Roundtable #1 | The History of Executive Power and Its Modern Uses

The question of executive power has plagued the United States since its inception. Historically, power has been vested in the legislature, but modern presidents have bucked precedent by using executive orders to establish government agencies, skirt laws which they disagree with, and to issue unprecedented immigration policies.

This roundtable discussion will present the legal history and analyze recent court cases pertaining to executive power so that we might present a reasonable picture of its future. The Founding Fathers originally imagined the United States as a nation with strong national legislature with power primarily vested in state governments.

It is important to recognize the structures responsible for this dramatic shift from state-local rule to national rule and from legislative governance to executive governance if we are to properly prepare for the repercussions of those realignments. If we are not careful during this liminal phase, unnecessary power may become vested in offices where it does not belong, putting American democracy and life as we know it at risk.

roundtableRoundtable ContributorsApril 18, 2019executive power, constitutional law, presidential powers, Trump, Hawaii v. Trump, supreme court, roundtableComment