I hesitate to say this...

because there's an obvious sense in which Lee Bollinger is the hero of the hour, and has done exactly the right thing: invite, and criticize. Listen, but take the occasion to (in the most literal sense) speak truth to power. Make clear that an invitation does not honor the dishonorable, and is about the interests of the listeners not that of the speaker. For once in the life of a "petty and cruel dictator," let him sit and listen to open and truthful criticism. The offer of a faculty position to Kian Tajbakhsh was an especially great move.

but...

but I can't get over the sense that he did exactly the wrong thing. One can refuse to invite. One can invite, and treat courteously, while relying on the general principle that such an invitation does not imply endorsement of the views expressed. But I'm not sure that inviting-and-insulting is the right thing to do; I was astonished to find myself in a bit of sympathy with Ahmadinejad's objections in the name of hospitality. The rules of hospitality are of a very different kind from the rules of intellectual discourse and debate-- but they're old and deep rules, not conditional on the extramural behavior or character of the guest, and I'm very uncomfortable with seeing them thrown overboard.

On a more mundane level, this might not be good for the general ability of universities to host controversial speakers. Such speakers always know they may face student protest, but it is something else to know that you may be introduced with a ten-minute denunciation. And when Bollinger crossed from questions, however rhetorical, for Ahmadinejad to answer into such (accurate!) personal descriptions as "cruel and petty dictator" or "ridiculous" or "I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions"-- before Ahmadinejad had had the chance to say a word!-- it seems to me that he crossed the line into grave discourtesy,and may have seriously dampened the willingness of speakers to be hosted by universities where there views are likely to be disagreed with.

John Coatsworth's direct aggressive questioning of Ahmadinejad after the latter's remarks, and giving the latter a chance to respond, was terrific. Students openly laughing at Ahmadinejad when he said there was no homosexuality in Iran-- great. The guest who comes to a debate can be expected to debate, and the guest who makes a fool of himself can expect to be laughed at. But Bollinger's remarks seem different to me.

Again, no quarrel with a word Bollinger said; and he might have been spectacularly right to say it. But I'm not sure...

ASPLP/ Nomos: Loyalty

While the program isn't yet finalized, the schedule for the next American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy meeting, December 28-29 in Baltimore at APA, is online.

Of local interest

I'm told that the new Minor in Political Theory was approved by the final step of the Powers That Be last week. It will take a while for it to appear in the course catalog and so on, but if there are McGill undergraduates who want to pursue that minor, they should start planning on it rather than doing something else just because the minor isn't on the list yet.

To discuss what "planning on it" entails and what courses make up a minor in political theory, feel free to get in touch with me by e-mail.

Must... fight... urge...

to engage Ilya Somin in lengthy debate on federalism in Star Trek. (Via Amber Taylor. Much too much to do, yet urge is strangely strong...

But I will suggest that the arrangement is probably confederal rather than federal-- there's no case I can think of in which the UFP legislated in a way that reached directly onto the surface of the planets, as it were. The problem is that we see vanishingly little of the civilian-to-civilian interactions that would be needed to decide the case. It's hard to learn much about how confederal, federal, or centralized a system is by watching the activities of its centralized military...

Update: OK, one more thing. The comments thread at Volokh quickly spiraled into the old standbys of social-science-geekery-about-Star Trek-- the allegedly post-scarcity economy (unless you happen to be a dilithium miner) and foreign policy/ the Prime Directive. That's because Ilya gave a very quirky tongue-in-cheek resource-extraction account of what the UFP's internal structure was like, but partly because those are the things we know how to talk about. Ilya's actual question-- how, if at all, is the Federation federal?-- isn't a Prime Directive question, and is only very indirectly a latinum question...

Dworkin wins Holberg Prize

Via the Chronicle, this announcement:

The Ludvig Holberg Memorial fund was established in 2003 by the Norwegian Parliament. The Board of the Fund annually awards the Holberg International Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanitites, social sciences, law and theology. The prize for 2007 is NOK 4.5 million (approx. € 555,000/$750,000).

Holberg International Memorial Prize 2007: Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin has developed an original and highly influential legal theory grounding law in morality, characterized by a unique ability to tie together abstract philosophical ideas and arguments with concrete everyday concerns in law, morals, and politics.

Dworkin provides a balanced solution to the intractable controversy between the two major legal schools of the 20th century: legal positivism and natural law. He understands the legal system as consisting of rules as well as principles, the latter being of moral nature (Taking Rights Seriously, 1977). Values and purposes become an inherent part of propositions of law through the activity of interpretation. A connected, important concept is the integrity of law, which requires judges to assume that the law must be structured by a coherent set of principles about justice, fairness and due process. In order to treat each individual equally, these principles must be enforced anew in each and every case (Law's Empire, 1986). Dworkin's most famous and contested thesis, namely the "one right answer" or "best possible interpretation" theory belongs in this context.

Dworkin has elaborated a liberal egalitarian theory emphasizing equality of dignity and respect and devoted to the conviction that at the heart of any decent conception of justified political action lies the idea of individual human worth (Life's Dominion, 1993; Freedom's Law, 1996; Sovereign Virtue, 2000). In recent years, Dworkin has worked on the conflict between majoritarianism and moral principles in a polarized society (Is Democracy Possible Here?, 2006).

Dworkin's pioneering scholarly work has had world wide impact. He has also participated extensively in public debate of contemporary political and legal issues.

A fuller tribute to Dworkin's career is provided here by Emilios Christodoulidis; it includes the following, which seems a little odd in a citation for a scholarly award.

It would be doing Dworkin an injustice, however, if one were not to conclude with what is most distinctive about his work: that is the way in which his theory informs his political interventions and his life as public intellectual. He is a passionate teacher, as generations of students in Oxford, New York and London will testify. But he is also an intellectual ‘engagé’: indicatively only, he is famous for his defence of affirmative action programmes; for his stance against apartheid; and for his frequent interventions to protect free speech.

It is the latter that is today perhaps the most poignant. It is to Dworkin’s great credit that he has raised his voice eloquently and clearly against the American Academy’s dubious complicity with its Administration’s harsh and illiberal anti-terrorist ‘Patriot Act’ and executive measures and practices.

Wake me up...

when September ends.

Mind the gaps

Good gap-closing.

Bad gap-closing.

With regard to the latter: I think that as an adopted Montrealer I'm not supposed to say unkind things about Eric Gagne. Fortunately for me, the LGM crowd is not so constrained.

Can you believe the Red Sox still have the best record in the majors?

Evolution and morality...

in today's NYT.

It just so happens that I counted the ballots today, and "Evolution and Morality" will be the topic for the ASPLP meeting in 2008, and the volume of Nomos that will follow.

RIP

Via Neil Gaiman, Robert Jordan has died. A family statement is here.

Revealing my ignorance

Could one of my Canadian and/or Quebecois friends or readers explain to me what this means?

As well, Quebec is negotiating free trade with Ontario and a Canada-wide manpower mobility agreement.

"I like the idea a lot, this vision of establishing a new space for the free circulation and mobility of persons," Charest said.

What is the sense in which Quebec doesn't already have free trade with Ontario? And what is the sense in which persons qua laborers aren't free to move around Canada? Is the latter just about licensed professionals? What's the former about at all? I was under the rather strong impression that Canada was an internal single market...

On accommodation

My remarks at the "Reasonable Accommodation" panel on Friday follow.

Five minutes is too short a time for an argument, and accordingly I won’t offer one. Instead I’ll offer some observations and draw some distinctions—recognizing that the relevance of the distinctions rests in part on arguments I won’t have time to offer.

First observation: the debate about reasonable accommodation is normal politics. It is not a crisis. It does not, as some Anglophone Canadians seem ready to suppose, demonstrate some distinctive, deep, dyed-in-the-pur-laine racism of Quebec society. It is one of the recurring facts about normal democratic politics that there is a cleavage between relatively urban, wealthy, cosmopolitan, liberal, and highly-educated groups and relatively rural, working-class, conservative, and less-educated groups, especially on questions of internationalism, free trade, immigration, and multiculturalism. One often sees an elite consensus across the major left-right parties on those issues; that often creates an opening for a more-populist party to apparently come out of nowhere and give voice to rural and working-class frustrations; and inevitably the urban cosmopolitan elites are shocked. Herouxville and the rise of the ADQ represent something routine in constitutional democracies; they’re part of the give-and-take of democratic politics.

First distinction: Reasonable accommodation is not immigration, and neither is bilingualism. There have been deliberate attempts to blur all of these boundaries. But issues of reasonable accommodation do not arise only in the context of recent immigrants to Quebec or to Canada, and most immigrants raise no questions of reasonable accommodation. Questions of reasonable accommodation typically arise about religious minorities, some of whom like Orthodox Jews have been in Montreal for generations. Conversely, most immigrants to Quebec come from secular or Catholic backgrounds and never request anything that could be classed as reasonable accommodation. It is especially important not to run together either reasonable accommodation or immigration with bilingualism, as has sometimes been done. Multiculturalism is not a mere stalking horse for Anglophone Canada in Quebec. And it is dangerous, potentially explosive, to encourage Francophone Quebecois to take out generations of complicated relationships to Anglophone Canada on either immigrants or religious minorities.

Second observation: “reasonable accommodation” as a phrase shows the limits of linguistic tricks and framing devices in politics. “Reasonable accommodation” should be impossible to resist or deny; it’s got “reasonable” built right into the name! But of course it’s not. The large part of the population that knows it’s skeptical about multiculturalism won’t be fooled into changing its mind by being told ex ante that the accommodations are reasonable ones.

Second distinction, which follows: Not all accommodation is reasonable. Some accommodations are less-than-reasonable; some are forbidden by basic justice or human rights, for example. And some accommodations are more-than-reasonable; they are actually demanded by basic justice, religious freedom, and human rights. In the middle are all the complicated cases involving something more like manners than like justice. This is what’s most important, and where there’s the most work to be done. In many cases, when religious believers have a religious duty that conflicts with a relatively weaker obligation to the state, they have a basic right to accommodation. When their religious duty would prevent them from taking part in the public sphere—from serving in the Mounties or the military, from voting, from attending public schools, from being able to go to court—then liberal democracies have a very powerful reason in justice to make accommodation, to bring the minorities into the public sphere rather than ghettoizing them. And when the religion commands violence, whether against group members or against outsiders, it’s morally prohibited to bend the criminal law to accommodate them—and indeed no one in Canada to the best of my knowledge has tried to request such accommodation, though there are cases in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Agreeing on the easy cases seems not to be so easy. The Herouxville norms mixed together easy right answers, like no stoning of women, with spectacularly wrong answers, like an insistence that real Quebecois eat any kind of meat butchered any old way and therefore Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and vegetarians need not apply. But even with the easy right answers in place, there would be plenty of hard questions about manners. Many of these involve questions of seeing and being seen, and many involve sex and gender. The obligation to wear a headscarf or a yarmulke, the obligation to eat kosher or halal food, are from the state’s perspective self-regarding. They’re private rights. But all of the conflicts involving religious men seeing scantily clad women, or religious women being scantily clad, or men not shaking women’s hands in the workplace, or women wishing not to be examined by male doctors—these aren’t self-regarding. They involve sometimes-onerous requests that non-believers or believers in other religious change their own behavior. At the same time it’s not prohibited by justice for compromises to sometimes be made—though the compromises may well be irksome to both sides for a while.

Come to Montreal

The International Political Science Association is meeting in Montreal April 30 – May 2, 2008. This isn't one of their big triennial World Congresses, but a smaller International Conference. The Congresses only come to North America once a decade or so, though.

Montreal's lovely by then-- the snow will have been gone for weeks by that time, and spring will be in session.

Dependence day

There's been a lot of blogospheric chatter about this graph:



Radley Balko asked:

Perhaps someone on the left (or for that matter, the right--since they've mostly been in charge of the government the last six years) can explain why having more than half the country's income dependent on the government (and rising) is in any way a healthy development.

and Matthew Yglesias replied

I see a population that's a lot healthier, longer-lived, and better educated than the one of 1950; a population where radically fewer people suffer from severe economic deprivation in absolute terms even as millions of impoverished people form around the world have moved to our shores.

I also see a population that, as a result of prosperity, is aging and it's a society that's prosperous enough for elderly people to generally not work and where retirees are given some public-sector guarantees of health care and economic security in their golden years. Most of all, I see a society that's shown that both Marx and Hayek were wrong -- that there's no need for capitalism to entail the immiseration of the vast majority of the population, and no need for efforts to use the public sector to better the condition of the majority to lead to tyranny and Communism; it's a society of democratic capitalism and social insurance and, despite its problems, it's one of the very best places to live throughout the entire history of the world.

See also: Daniel Larison, Reihan Salam, Andrew Sullivan.

I haven't yet seen anyone look at the chart and say: "BS."

I'm pretty sure the magazine Insight is being treated as an authoritative source here, which is our first clue that we're looking at something less than especially rigorous social science. Second clue: Two lines that mirror one another perfectly, which is to say two categories that are being defined as mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive (they always sum to 100%). "Private workers" and "government beneficiaries" total to 100%-- according to the legend, "of the U.S. population"? Really? What about children? Stay-at-home parents or spouses? Unemployed workers living on savings? Retirees living on private pensions? I'm pretty sure that these categories are being constructed in something other than the usual way. Just by itself, the idea that "private workers" as a percentage of the U.S. population has fallen by almost half over the decades that women have roughly doubled their labor force participation rates doesn't pass the laugh test.

My guess? What we're looking at has a categories of "government beneficiaries" that was cobbled together by counting all prisoners, all government employees including military personnel, and all persons receiving Social Security, Medicare, any farm subsidy, any welfare program, or unemployment insurance. The category "private workers" was defined as (100%- that quantity). As the population ages, the number of people getting some combination of Social Security, Medicare, and VA benefits or military pensions has risen dramatically-- which tells us nothing about what proportion of their income comes from those sources. The prison population has steadily risen; but so has the number of different federal programs that some people get some bit of their income from. One doesn't cease to be a "private worker" because one also got an SBA loan, or unemployment benefits for a few weeks, or an interest subsidy on the student loans being repaid from the college degree several years ago. One can argue against all those programs, but not like this.

This graph is almost certainly a net subtraction from the knowledge in the world, and an uninteresting foundation for discussion about the role of the state in the economy.

The great divide...

between administrators and academics, from a NYT article on the growth of tuition-paying master's programs (conspicuously centered on Chicago's MAPSS program):

“Sometimes there is unused capacity in graduate classrooms,” Mr. Mehaffy said. “If there are 10 people in a graduate course one year and 15 the next, there is a 50 percent growth but no real drain on the institution.”

Riiight.

(I feel odd either expanding on what's wrong with this, which would seem pointless to those who have taught or taken graduate seminars, or not doing so, which would seem snobbish to those who haven't. Suffice it to say that the number of chairs in the classroom is not the only relevant measure of "capacity.")

The article itself is fine. I used to worry that these programs were purely exploitative of tuition-paying MA students. I then taught enough of them who were able to springboard into better doctoral programs than they otherwise could have done, and enough who were able to discover that grad school in the long term wasn't for them without going through the soul-crushing experience of leaving a doctoral program partway through, to decide that the students often seemed to think they were getting their money's worth.

Now I worry about something oddly unmentioned in the article. Elite undergraduate education has an ocean of financial aid and scholarships supporting it. Doctoral programs pay (meager but still measured in positive numbers) stipends that allow the students to get by, and typically don't charge tuition. To the degree that we arms-race our way into a position where this other credential is needed either for competitiveness in the job market or for competitiveness in doctoral admissions, we've introduced a stage that is wholly dependent on prior resources-- that is, a class-reinforcing rather than a class-mobility stage. This is already at the margins undermining some of the good of the wonderful American system of financial aid for elite undergrad education-- some undergrads are getting to the end of their BA and finding that they think they need a new degree, @ $30,000-$40,000 of tuition p/a for 1-2 years. And it seems likely to accelerate-- as the article notes, the interests of the students who can pay and the interests of the universities getting paid are simpatico here and will spiral. (The competitive value of the credential drives ever-more people to think they need it.)

This is less an indictment than a worry. I don't know how far along this path we are. I don't know how unavailable financial aid for those programs is. But I worry that a new piece is getting put into place in American higher education that works at cross-purposes to some of the existing pieces.

(Disclaimer: MA programs in the liberal arts disciplines such as political science are routine in Canada, and typically needed for admission to PhD programs-- bu tthe financial structure of them is very different, and the dynamics of the whole system are changed by the expectation that everyone will get such an MA. I'm not sure what I think about the Canadian system yet, but any problems with it are different from those described here. No one has to drop $35,000 to get one of our MAs in political science.)

Graduate conference in political theory

Call for Papers

Princeton University
Graduate Conference in Political Theory: April 11-12, 2008

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach, and/or topic in political theory, political philosophy, and/or the history of political thought. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.

Each session, led by a discussant from Princeton, will be focused exclusively on one paper and will feature an extensive question and answer period with Princeton faculty and students. Papers will be pre-circulated among conference participants.

The keynote address will be given by Professor Alan Ryan (Warden of New College, Oxford).

Please limit your paper submission to 7500 words and format it for
blind review (the file should include your title but also be free of personal and institutional information). Submissions are due by December 15, 2007 via the conference website, https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/submit.php . Acceptance notices will be sent in January, 2008. Papers will be refereed on a blind basis by current graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton.

Assistance for invited participants’ transportation, lodging and meal expenses is available from the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of The Dean of the Graduate School, The University Center for Human Values, The Council of the Humanities, The Department of Classics, The Department of Politics, and The Department of Philosophy.

All papers should be submitted through the online form. Submissions by email or snail mail will not be accepted.

Questions and comments can be directed to: polthry@princeton.edu

For more information, please visit the conference website at: https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/

It's that time

Friday's high: 92 degrees.

Sunday's low: 46 degrees.

Just sayin.'

Elsewhere

Brad DeLong posts a terrific and fascinating paper on economic history and the history of economic thought and the generations of development economics. Two tastes:

Thus in Marx's view, economic historians and development economists were or ought to be the same. In fact, all economists and economic historians ought to be the same. In fact, everybody ought to be an economic historian: studying the social and industrial history of England, and then applying its lessons everywhere around the globe, was the most important task. Economic historians ought to rule the world, for they held the key to the lock that opened the door behind which was concealed the answer to the riddle of human destiny. There was one qualification. As a secondary task one needed to be a political historian--and not a political historian of England, but of France. As Friedrich Engels said in a revealing moment, "Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie England is here taken as the typical country; for the political development, France." But the politics was added-on superstructure: the economy was fundamental base.

Now the cup that Marx offered turned out to be a poisoned chalice, and I think there were three reasons for this.

First, as a matter of historical understanding--well, (the mind does boggle at the grafting of France's political history onto England's industrial one. No country, anywhere, anytime has had the political history of France and the industrial history of England. A focus on politics tends to make one anticipate revolutions and seizures of state power and expect state-led economic transformation. But thumb-fingered states are capable of only certain types of economic transformations, and the free society of wealthy and productive associated producers that Marx tried to order was simply not on the menu. Taking France's political and England's economic history leading to mass revolution that produces a left anarchy as the model, and trying to explain every deviation from that as second-order factors imposing transitory disturbances on a dominant tendency--well, that is not an easy task.

[...]

Adam Smith had said, in lecture: "Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice." For Rostow much more was required: The traditional economy. The creations of the preconditions for takeoff--an honest government, good market institutions, and commercial and financial sophistication. The "takeoff" itself--a substantial rise in the savings and investment rate made possible by the opportunities in leading sectors opened up by modern technology and financial mobilization, and that would transform the economy from an earth-bound to a sky-free creature. Followed by the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption.

But in the decolonization age of the High Cold War the first priority of the Dulleses and the Rusks was to line up newly-independent countries and the older states of Latin America on the U.S. team for the great tug-of-war. And this required gaining the favor of the new princes who ruled. And as Machiavelli taught us long ago, there is nothing more difficult than being a new prince: all of one's energy must be devoted to state-building so that one does not rapidly become an ex-prince.

State-building requires that you make friends who will be your supporters, which requires that you make people who want to be your friends happy, which often means rich, which requires that you give them some other people's money, which requires that you find some other people with money whose money you can give, which tends not to be great for economic development. Rostow went with Kennedy to Indonesia. Rostow had primed Kennedy to negotiate on how the U.S. could aid Indonesian economic development. But Indonesian dictator Sukarno, stuck between a large rural land redistribution-seeking Communist movement and an army officered by the relatives of local notable landlords, did not think he could take the long view. Kennedy talked about the Peace Corps and aid and technical assistance and economic development and a South Asian Development Bank. Sukarno's response? "Mr. President, development takes too long. Give me West Irian instead"--West Irian being the western half of the island we westerners call New Guinea. Sukarno got West Irian, and the Year of Living Dangerously.

This should not have come as a great surprise. State-building, the pursuit of empire, and political organization always had an uneasy relationship with economic prosperity and growth.

Kerala

A NYT story on the Kerala model, much discussed by Sen and his followers, and the ways in which it is fiscally dependent on cash remittances from emigrants. I'm reminded of recurring discussions chez Will Wilkinson about whether the nation-state is a salient unit of economic analysis. Indian federal states are comparable in size to most nation-states in the world-- but they're not free-standing economies.

Conference announcement: CSPT: "Intellectual Foundings: J.G.A. Pocock and the Cambridge School"

INTELLECTUAL FOUNDINGS: J.G.A. POCOCK AND THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL

September 28, 2007
Columbia University, New York, NY

Co-sponsored by The Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Center for Law and
Philosophy, and The Columbia University Seminar on Political and Social Thought

"Intellectual Foundings" will celebrate and reconsider *The Ancient
Constitution and the Feudal Law*. Published fifty years ago by John Pocock, one of the principal founders of the CSPT, *The Ancient Constitution* launched the late twentieth century revolution in the study of the history of political thought that gave rise to what is widely labeled the "Cambridge School."

This conference will bring together a distinguished collection of
historians, legal thinkers, and political theorists to engage in a concentrated discussion of the intellectual vistas opened up--as well as of those which might have been supplanted or occluded--by this work and a few companion works of the same period.

Speakers will include David Armitage, Mark Bevir, Janelle Greenberg, Sudipta Kaviraj,
Donald Kelley, David Lieberman, Kirstie McClure, Robert Travers, Richard Tuck, and Melinda Zook.

We hope this event will be of interest to scholars of history and theory
from the U.S. west coast to the east, as well as points between, and Professor Pocock
himself has made plans to attend. All members of CSPT and other interested parties are welcome to attend; there is no fee for attendance.

To register for the conference, email Jonah Cardillo at jgc92@columbia.edu
with subject line "CSPT Conference Registration." Please include your name, affiliation, and address.

For more information, please visit the conference website:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/polisci/cspt/2007_conference.html.

We hope to see you there!

Best,

David Johnston and Kirstie McClure, CSPT Co-chairs

PHD

Jorge Cham, creator of the indispensable Piled Higher and Deeper, is coming to town.

Methods in political theory

There's a big discussion at Crooked Timber; there was a big discussion following Andrew Rehfeld's "Offensive Political Theory" at APSA; there was a big discussion at our theorists' group dinner Friday night at APSA; there's a new Piled Higher and Deeper strip that seems to call into question our place in the social sciences. Must be something in the water.

Reading list

Colin Farrelly reviews Vermeule's Judging Under Uncertainty.

A busy fall

Conference announcement: Immigration, Minorities, and Multiculturalism in Democracies, October 25 – 27, 2007,
Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, Montréal.

The complete program is too big to post; go have a look. This is a project of the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Ethnicity and Democratic Governance.

And don't forget the other conferences earlier this fall: Pluralism, Politics, and God? An International Symposium on Religion and Public Reason, September 13-15; and The Plural States of Recognition, September 27-29.

To read after class:

The NYT has posted a lengthy article-interview of Jack Goldsmith by Jeffrey Rosen, to appear in next week's NYT Magazine.

Now Goldsmith is speaking out. In a new book, “The Terror Presidency,” which will be published later this month, and in a series of conversations I had with him this summer, Goldsmith has recounted how, from his first weeks on the job, he fought vigorously against an expansive view of executive power championed by officials in the White House, including Alberto Gonzales, who was then the White House counsel and who recently resigned as attorney general, and David Addington, who was then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and is now his chief of staff. [...]

Goldsmith told me that he has decided to speak publicly about his battles at the Justice Department because he hopes that “future presidents and people inside the executive branch can learn from our mistakes.” In his view, American presidents for the foreseeable future will, like George W. Bush, face enormous pressure to be aggressive and pre-emptive in taking measures to prevent another terrorist attack in the United States. At the same time, Goldsmith notes, everywhere the president looks, critics — as well as his own lawyers — are telling him that pre-emptive actions may violate international law as well as U.S. criminal law. What, exactly, are the legal limits of executive power in the post-9/11 world? How should administration lawyers negotiate the conflict between the fear of attacks and the fear of lawsuits?

In Goldsmith’s view, the Bush administration went about answering these questions in the wrong way. Instead of reaching out to Congress and the courts for support, which would have strengthened its legal hand, the administration asserted what Goldsmith considers an unnecessarily broad, “go-it-alone” view of executive power. As Goldsmith sees it, this strategy has backfired. “They embraced this vision,” he says, “because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it.”

APSA blogging

Larry Solum has posted his copious notes from one of the best events I saw at APSA, the "new originalism" roundtable.