Academic Work

Click here to see my SSRN page.

“The Lost Senate,” Virginia Law Review 113 (forthcoming 2027).

(Winner of 2023-2024 Stanford Law School Legal History Paper Prize)

(Winner of 2024 Federalist Society Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition)

(Watch a conference presentation of a draft; my remarks begin at 1:17:35)

Working Abstract

The United States struggles to craft and execute a “grand strategy,” or a long-term, holistic, and prioritized plan to secure its interests abroad. This is a consequence, I argue, not of domestic polarization or benign geopolitical conditions, as social scientists posit, but of constitutional law. Because the U.S. Constitution divides authority over foreign affairs and prescribes frequent transfers of power, the government can rarely agree on foreign-policy aims, maintain those aims over time, and implement a whole-of-government plan to accomplish them.

But it need not have been this way—and very nearly was not. Until the proverbial eleventh hour of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, in fact, nearly all delegates assumed the Senate, a permanent body insulated from popular pressure, would exercise near-plenary authority over foreign affairs.

This Article recovers that forgotten vision of the Senate as a “council of grand strategists,” a body endowed with the qualities and vested with the authorities to direct foreign policy. Nationalist delegates’ “original hope” for such a council, alongside confederalists’ “original fear” of it, animated the Convention’s debates over the Senate’s form and functions. At stake was not only the Senate’s role in foreign relations but also the nation’s capacity to orchestrate grand strategy. The interbranch struggle over foreign policy that we are familiar with today emerged not as a consequence of “reflection and choice,” but as a byproduct of the Convention’s late-stage compromises, which undermined delegates’ confidence in the Senate.

Scholars of U.S. foreign relations law have criticized the outsized role that post-ratification political practice plays in settling interbranch foreign-policy disputes. Meanwhile, scholars of international relations have lamented the chronic absence of U.S. grand strategy. By developing and applying a novel theory of the relationship between constitutional arrangement and grand strategy, this Article provides a unified explanation for both puzzles grounded in the Constitution’s creation. The Convention’s ad hoc and imprecise scattering of foreign-policy powers among rival institutions, each subject to frequent turnover, made grand strategy an unrealistic expectation of American constitutional government and left constitutional gaps that “historical gloss” has filled.

At a moment of increasing volatility in U.S. foreign policy, this history suggests that the instability is not so much a failure of statesmanship or bipartisanship as it is a result of constitutional design. By carefully reconstructing Convention debates, this Article also casts doubt on claims that the Article II Vesting Clause silently confers broad residual foreign-policy prerogatives on the president.

“Franklin D. Roosevelt, World War II, and the Reality of Constitutional Statesmanship,” Texas National Security Review 7, no. 2 (Spring 2024): 56-94.

(Click here to listen to a podcast where I discuss the article.)

Abstract

Is statesmanship compatible with constitutional government? Scholars have posited the possibility of “constitutional statesmanship” in America but have done little to probe its historical reality or evaluate its consequences. To illustrate some of the limits, possibilities, and ambivalences of constitutional statesmanship in practice, this article examines Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership on the home front as the country contemplated and later waged war abroad. I argue that while the president applied constitutional statesmanship to prepare his nation for war, this brand of circumscribed statesmanship later struggled to resolve the tensions between the demands of war and the dictates of constitutionalism. After explaining how distinct notions of constitutionalism generate unique expectations of statesmanship, I show how Roosevelt’s own conceptions of the U.S. Constitution and American statesmanship, developed before World War II, elucidate his leadership decisions during wartime. His leadership, for good or ill, indelibly shaped the powers of the U.S. commander in chief and the constitutional order we live under today.

This article proceeds in six parts. First, I urge the rehabilitation of “statesmanship” as an evaluative standard, a standard undervalued in presidency studies and ill understood in American public discourse. To this end, I define constitutional statesmanship and posit a method of evaluating leadership against its standard. Because evaluating a leader against this standard requires an appreciation for the conceptual relationship between constitutionalism and statesmanship, I also illustrate how distinct notions of constitutionalism generate distinct expectations of statesmen. Second, I discuss my case selection, Roosevelt in World War II, the sources dictated by that case, and the intellectual and historical contexts that framed prevailing understandings of American constitutionalism and statesmanship in that era. Third, I outline FDR’s own conceptions of the U.S. Constitution and the place for statesmanship within it. Fourth, I explain FDR’s prewar, national defense–oriented leadership in terms of those conceptions and then evaluate his leadership against the standard of constitutional statesmanship. Fifth, I likewise explain and appraise his wartime actions. Finally, I conclude by comparing Roosevelt’s contemporaries’ evaluations of his constitutional leadership, demonstrating what the standard developed herein adds to those evaluations, and illustrating how precedents Roosevelt established have been used and abused by his successors.

“Between Republic and Empire: How Constitutional Ratification Rejected Isolationism,” in 1776: The Beginnings of American Exceptionalism Abroad (Washington, DC: Alexander Hamilton Society, 2026), 52-79.

Abstract

When the proposed Constitution went to the states for consideration, the charter’s proponents, the Federalists, and its opponents, the so-called Anti-Federalists, agreed that their fledgling Union was exceptional. They disagreed, however, on how best to preserve this Union’s uniquely republican character and the vast territory it was destined to settle. The Federalists contended that happiness at home depended on strength abroad, that external threats imperiled the republic’s survival more than internal ones, and that America would only endure by making the world hospitable to its republican form. Stridently and often cogently, the Anti-Federalists disputed each of these claims—and Americans adopted the Constitution over their objections. Whatever the merits of the Anti-Federalist case at the Founding, and though their concerns echo throughout American history, bearing fidelity to our Constitution demands we recognize ratification for what it was: a repudiation of the Anti-Federalist theory of preserving American exceptionalism through American isolation. We honor that choice of popular sovereignty today when we recall and apply the Federalists’ vision of peace through strength.

Work in Progress: “The Executive Travels Alone: Presidential Prerogative and Judicial Abstention in War.”

(Winner of 2025 Eaton Award, University of Chicago Federalist Society, for excellence in constitutional scholarship)

Working Abstract

Not infrequently, presidents exercise what John Locke called executive prerogative, or “the Power to act according to discretion, for the publick good, without the prescription of Law and sometimes even against it.” Or at least they used to. From Jefferson’s response to the Chesapeake affair to the many unilateral actions Lincoln undertook in response to the Confederacy’s initiation of war, nineteenth-century presidents asserted prerogative in ways Locke would have recognized. That is, they exercised an extraconstitutional tool of statesmanship justified by necessity and subjected to popular ex post judgment. Since at least the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), however, presidents have increasingly pointed to within the Constitution to justify their expressions of prerogative power and have sought legal (and often preemptive) sanction for them.

This conversion of Lockean prerogative into an essentially legal tool threw prerogative out of the political arena and into the courtroom for scrutiny. And it put courts in a bind that I call (for want of a cleverer name) the “judicial dilemma.” Aware of the executive’s occasional need to resort to extraconstitutional prerogative, on the one hand, but also recognizing that sanctioning the use of prerogative power might routinize it, on the other hand, judges have constructed canons of abstention that accommodate extraconstitutional prerogative without perverting constitutional meaning. Beginning with Justice Robert Jackson’s jurisprudence in World War II but resonating today in our courts’ political-question doctrine, the abstention solution to the judicial dilemma is commendable in its aim, elegant in its resolution, and also indefensible as a matter of constitutional law.

This paper traces courts’ accommodation of extraconstitutional prerogative: its origins, its evolution in form, and its practical merits and constitutional flaws. I illustrate how a change in political practice — namely, presidents’ substitution of legalized prerogative for extralegal Lockean prerogative — engendered a change in judicial behavior. In response to the political change, judges first turned to abstention before later settling on the political-question doctrine to resolve the judicial dilemma. I proceed in six parts. First, in Part I, I explain Locke’s theory of executive prerogative: what it is, why it exists in Locke’s framework, how it was to be performed and judged, and why it is central to the dilemma interrogated in this essay. Then, to illustrate how American presidents converted Lockean prerogative, an essentially extraconstitutional political tool, into a legal one, I compare the use of prerogative by two wartime presidents. In Part II, I show how Lincoln exercised Lockean prerogative and, in Part III, how FDR legalized it with the aid of his attorney general Robert Jackson. Part VI explains how Jackson, once on the bench, attempted to resolve the judicial dilemma (self-imposed by his work in FDR’s administration) through judicial abstention. Part V argues that Jackson’s then-lonely position has since been subsumed by the Court’s political-question doctrine, which incorporates both the merits of Jackson’s solution but also its constitutional infirmities. Finally, Part VI concludes with a qualified defense of Jackson’s abstention solution as well as an appeal to resurrect the nineteenth-century practice of Lockean prerogative.