Today at Georgetown Law, we are hosting a conference on "War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority" by Mariah Zeisberg. If you are interested in attending please email me at lsolum@gmail.com. Space is very limited at this point, but there is room for a few more.
Here is a description of the book:
Armed interventions in Libya, Haiti, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea challenged the US president and Congress with a core question of constitutional interpretation: does the president, or Congress, have constitutional authority to take the country to war? War Powers argues that the Constitution doesn't offer a single legal answer to that question. But its structure and values indicate a vision of a well-functioning constitutional politics, one that enables the branches of government themselves to generate good answers to this question for the circumstances of their own times.
Mariah Zeisberg shows that what matters is not that the branches enact the same constitutional settlement for all conditions, but instead how well they bring their distinctive governing capacities to bear on their interpretive work in context. Because the branches legitimately approach constitutional questions in different ways, interpretive conflicts between them can sometimes indicate a successful rather than deficient interpretive politics. Zeisberg argues for a set of distinctive constitutional standards for evaluating the branches and their relationship to one another, and she demonstrates how observers and officials can use those standards to evaluate the branches' constitutional politics. With cases ranging from the Mexican War and World War II to the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Iran-Contra scandal, War Powers reinterprets central controversies of war powers scholarship and advances a new way of evaluating the constitutional behavior of officials outside of the judiciary.
And here is the conference schdule:
Conference on "War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority" by Mariah Zeisberg
September 13-14, 2013
Georgetown University Law Center
(All Sessions in McDonough 588)
Friday, September 13
12:00 p.m. Lunch (for anyone attending the conference)
1:00 p.m Session One
Heidi Kitrosser (University of Minnesota)
Lawrence Solum (Georgetown University)
2:45 p.m. Break
3:00 p.m. Session Two
Joshua Chafetz (Cornell University)
Rogers Smith (University of Pennsylvana)
Saturday, September 14
8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast
9:00 a.m. Session Three
Mark Graber (University of Maryland)
Mark Tushnet (Harvard University)
10:45 a.m. Break
11:00 a.m. Session Four
Steve Vladeck (American University)
Kenneth Anderson (American University)
Mariah Zeisberg (Univeristy of Michigan)
1:00 p.m. Lunch & Departures