Presidential Emergency Powers
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Philip Zelikow, a lawyer and former senior official involved in the current tariff litigation, will detail the policy and legal background for the emergency powers issue now before the Court. He will discuss the way both trade law and emergency powers evolved before this historic test, and describe the challenge of finding an “intelligible principle” to limit this unprecedented assertion of presidential power. His policy experience with foreign emergencies includes work in five administrations of both parties, and directing the 9/11 Commission.
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Philip Zelikow is the Botha-Chan Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. For 25 years he held a chaired professorship in history at the University of Virginia, where he also directed the nation’s leading research center on the American presidency. For seven years before that, he was an associate professor at Harvard University. In his scholarship, Zelikow focuses on critical episodes in world history and the challenges of policy design and statecraft. His most recent book is The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Turning Point of the Great War, 1916-17 (2021). An attorney and former career diplomat, Zelikow’s federal service includes work across the government in the five administrations from Reagan through Obama. On the NSC Staff (1989-91) he took part in the diplomacy to unify Germany and end the Cold War. As Counselor of the Department of State (2005-07) he had deputy-level policy responsibilities on issues around the world. He is one of few Americans to have served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board for presidents from both political parties. Zelikow has also directed three successful and bipartisan national commissions: the Carter-Ford commission on federal election reform (2001), the 9/11 Commission (2004), and the Covid Crisis Group. That group’s acclaimed report, Lessons from the Covid War, was published in April 2023. |
