Third Rail Series: What are the Limits of Presidential Power?

What are the limits of presidential power? Listen and Decide.

As questions surrounding executive power dominate the news cycle, many Americans have been left wanting to learn more. CPH can help, by offering the perspectives of a variety of experts each discussing different aspects of the history of presidential power. A CPH Third Rail Lecture Series event, this evening will not only help inform people, but also demonstrate that even when disagreeing, Americans can still come together and discuss their differences respectfully, politely, and with the ever-present thought that what unites us as citizens of our shared republic is forever greater than our temporary divisions.

The Third Rail Lecture on November 6th will feature Heather Carlquist Walser (Southern Methodist University), Dan Margolies (University of North Carolina), Jack Rakove (Stanford University), Nicole Hemmer (Vanderbilt University), Christopher McKnight Nichols (The Ohio State University), Sarah Burns (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jeff Kahn (American University). This event is cosponsored with the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute.

Heather Carlquist Walser is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History. She is working on a project tentatively titled Negotiating Peace and Power: Amnesty in the Nineteenth Century United States which examines how the government and public used amnesty as a tool to resolve violent political conflicts about the Constitution throughout the nineteenth century including the wake of the American Civil War.

Dan Margolies is the director of strategic initiatives at the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media. He is trained as a historian and has expertise on the history of U.S. foreign relations with an emphasis on legal spatiality, but has published on a variety of historical, legal, and musical topics. Margolies’ most recent book is the first full study of COVID-related music, titled ¡Maldito Coronavirus! Mapping Latin American Musical Responses to the Pandemic Moment.

Jack Rakove is the Coe Professor of History and American Studies as well as a political science and law professor at Stanford University. His research has focused on the origins of the American Revolution and Constitution, the political practice and theory  of James Madison, and the role of historical knowledge in constitutional litigation. He has authored several books including the Pulitzer Prize in History winning Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution and is a past president of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic.

Nicole Hemmer is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is a political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the presidency. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the interplay of social movements, electoral politics, and political culture in order to probe the complexities of political identity and practice in the 20th century United States. Her latest book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, is a bold reinterpretation of the Reagan presidency and the conservative movement.

Sarah Burns is a fellow at the Quincy Institute and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. She has written extensively on war powers, American foreign policy, democratic peace theory, elections, and Montesquieu’s constitutionalism. Her book The Politics of War Powers discusses how the Constitution intentionally puts the president and legislature at odds over control of military affairs.

Christopher McKnight Nichols is the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies as well as a Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He specializes on the history of the United States’ relationship to the rest of the world. He has written several books including Promise and Peril: America at the awn of a Global Age, which examines the origins of modern American isolationism and the interplay of isolationism, international engagement, and domestic reform from the 1890’s through the 1940’s.

Jeff Kahn is a professor of law and the Director of the Law & Government Program.  His work focuses on constitutional law, national security law, Russian law, and human rights. He is the author of Mrs. Shipley’s Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists and co-author of National Security Law and the Constitution, now in its third edition. He testified as an expert witness for the successful plaintiff in Ibrahim v. DHS (N.D. Cal., Dec. 4, 2013), to date the only No-Fly List case to be decided at the trial stage. His work on Russian law has been published in various law reviews as well as the peer-reviewed Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism, Russian Politics, and the Review of Central and East European Law. His latest research focuses on the influence of the Council of Europe in Russia, particularly the European Convention on Human Rights.