Congress and the Separation of Powers - with Julia Azari, Ira Katznelson, and Gary Lawson
Channel: NEIU Libraries
Date: 27/03/2022

On Wednesday, March 16, the Northeastern Illinois University Libraries hosted a Zoom panel discussion analyzing the U.S. Congress and its relationship to the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers as defined by the U.S. Constitution. Panelists Julia Azari, Ira Katznelson, and Gary Lawson addressed pressing questions of historical and contemporary debate: What has been the role of Congress in promoting the expansion of the administrative state? How has partisan polarization changed the relationship between Congress and the President? How has the balance of power between the judicial branch and the elected branches shifted over the course of the last twenty years? And will conflicts between the branches increase as a result of partisan polarization, or will times of unified control bring ever greater cooperation?

The panelists' opening remarks and responses to each other were followed by Q&A with the audience. The event was moderated by William Adler.

This event was made possible by grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) distributed by the American Library Association (ALA) to the NEIU Libraries as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. It was held as part of an ongoing panel event series, "Perspectives on the Constitution," that features scholars with differing perspectives on controversial issues related to the United States Constitution. This series is co-sponsored by the departments of History and Political Science at Northeastern Illinois University.

Speaker biographies:

Julia Azari is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. She holds her PhD from Yale University and her BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include the American presidency, American political parties, and the politics of the American state. Her research has been supported by a variety of foundations including the Harry Middleton Fellowship in Presidential Studies, the Gerald Ford Presidential Library Travel Grant, and the Harry Truman Library Institute. She is a regular contributor to the political science blog Mischiefs of Faction and her work has also appeared in many other locations including FiveThirtyEight. Her book, Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014.

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University. His Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013) was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in Political Science. Professor Katznelson’s most recent book is Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (2018; with David Bateman and John Lapinski). He has served as Pitt Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge (2017-18), and as president of the Social Science Research Council (2012-17), the American Political Science Association (2005-06), and the Social Science History Association (1997-98).

Gary Lawson came to Boston University in January 2000 after eleven years at Northwestern University School of Law; he was named the Philip S. Beck Professor of Law in 2012. He has authored nine editions of a textbook on administrative law and has co-authored a textbook on constitutional law. He has authored or co-authored nearly one hundred scholarly articles and five university press books on topics ranging from aspects of constitutional theory and history to the proof of legal propositions, and his work has been cited in sixteen opinions of U.S. Supreme Court justices. He is a founding member, and serves on the Board of Directors, of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. Professor Lawson twice clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, first at the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then at the United States Supreme Court.