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Teach-In

Teach in Speaker

Teach In

Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences
Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage
TOPIC: PRESIDENTIAL POWER AND THE CONSTITUTION
Friday, Feb. 28, 2025

About Teach In

The nation’s best teachers come to OU every spring for a day of teaching and discussion about some aspect of the Constitution. This has been a signature event for the campus and the community since 2012, and thousands of students and citizens have attended the lectures. Recent topics include “Native Nations and the Constitution” and “The Supreme Court and the Constitution.” Teach-In is supported by the generosity of donors, especially the Horizon Foundation.

2025 Teach In Event Information

Sam Noble Museum of Natural History

TOPIC: PRESIDENTIAL POWER AND THE CONSTITUTION
Friday, Feb. 28, 2025

Location: The University of Oklahoma Memorial Union
900 Asp. Ave. Norman, OK

Stylized crimson line.

Parking Instructions

Limited parking is available in the union parking garage.

Agenda

Session #

Time

Session Title

Introduction

9:00 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.

Introduction and Welcome

Session I

9:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.

"Is Presidential Power an Empty Promise?”
Kenneth Lowande
University of Michigan

“The Founders’ President”
Julian Mortenson
University of Michigan Law School

Session II

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

“Lincoln’s Lost Legacy: Presidential Powers in Constitutional Amendment”
Richard Albert
 The University of Texas at Austin

“All Roads Lead to the White House: Building the Modern President in Gilded Age America (1873-1921)”
Andrea Katz
Washington University School of Law

Lunch

12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

“Executive Privilege: Secrecy v. Democratic Accountability”
Mark Rozell
George Mason University

Session III

1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

“Is Ambition Enough to Counteract Ambition? The Role of Institutional Capacity in Constraining Executive Power”
Sharece Thrower
Vanderbilt University

“The Imperial Presidency Strikes Back”
Andrew Rudalevige
Bowdoin College

Session IV

3:15 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Panel Discussion

Meet Our 2025 Speakers

Richard Albert

Richard Albert

The University of Texas at Austin

Presentation Title:
“Lincoln’s Lost Legacy: Presidential Powers in Constitutional Amendment”

Richard Albert is an author, teacher, and consultant on constitutionalism and democracy. A graduate of Yale, Oxford, and Harvard, he has published over 30 books, including “Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions” (Oxford), “Amending America’s Unwritten Constitution” (Cambridge), and “The Limits and Legitimacy of Referendums” (Oxford). He is the founding director of the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism and formerly served as president of the International Society of Public Law. Richard Albert holds the Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also Professor of Government and Director of Constitutional Studies.


Andrea Katz

Andrea Katz

Washington University School of Law

Presentation Title:
“All Roads Lead to the White House: Building the Modern President in Gilded Age America (1873-1921)”

Andrea Scoseria Katz is an associate professor of law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. Professor Katz teaches and writes about constitutional law, with a focus on presidential power. Her work draws from constitutional law, legal history, political theory and comparative politics to explore questions of separation-of-powers theory, constitutionalism and the development of the American president and the modern administrative state, especially during the Progressive Era (1890-1920). Her work has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Harvard Law Review Forum and the International Journal of Constitutional Law, among others. Katz has also published work on courts, constitutional amendments and presidential power in Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay.

Katz received a doctorate in political science from Yale University and a juris doctorate from Yale Law School. After law school, Katz clerked at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, for Judge András Sajó, and in the District of Massachusetts for Judge Michael A. Ponsor. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Rio de Janeiro, the University of São Paulo and the University of Tokyo, and she was a Golieb Fellow in Legal History at NYU Law School before joining the Washington University faculty in fall 2020.


Kenneth Loweande

Kenneth Lowande

The University of Michigan

Presentation Title:
"Is Presidential Power an Empty Promise?"

Kenneth Lowande studies and teaches classes about how presidents use power, how Congress oversees the executive and how bureaucrats implement policy. He is an associate professor of political science and public policy and a faculty associate in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Previously, he held research fellowships at Washington University in St. Louis and Princeton University. His work has been discussed in the The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Fox News and ABC News. His new book, False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age, was published in October 2024, and has been called “a tour de force that will reorient scholarship on the American presidency”


Julian Mortenson

Julian Mortenson

Michigan Law

Presentation Title:
"The Founders' President"

Julian Davis Mortenson, a legal historian and constitutional litigator specializing in the constitutional and political history of early America, is the James G. Phillip Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. His scholarship on our 18th-century understanding of executive power is widely viewed as setting a new paradigm for debates in political and legal theory, and his constitutional law textbook has been adopted widely at universities throughout North America. Mortenson's current book project develops a comprehensive account of presidential power at the American founding.


Mark Rozzell

Mark Rozell

George Mason University

Presentation Title:
"Executive Privilege: Secrecy v. Democratic Accountability"

Mark J. Rozell is the founding dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason , where he holds the Ruth D. and John T. Hazel Faculty Chair in Public Policy. He is the author of numerous studies in U.S. government and politics.

His books on executive powers and the Constitution include Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability (5th edition forthcoming, with Mitchel Sollenberger), The Unitary Executive Theory: A Danger to Constitutional Government (2020, with Sollenberger and Jeffrey Crouch) and The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution (2012, with Sollenberger), all published by University Press of Kansas.

His latest co-written books are The Changing Political South: How Minorities and Women are Transforming the Region (2024) and African American Statewide Candidates in the New South (2022), both with Charles Bullock, Susan MacManus and Jeremy Mayer, and published by Oxford University Press. The latter volume was co-recipient of the Southern Political Science Association’s VO Key Award for best volume on Southern politics in the past two years.


Andrew Rudalevige

Andrew Rudalevige

Bowdoin College
Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government

Presentation Title:
"The Imperial Presidency Strikes Back"

Andrew Rudalevige is the Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government at Bowdoin College in Maine, and an affiliate of the Centre on United States Politics at University College London and the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard University, he has also held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Princeton University, the University of East Anglia, Dickinson College, and Sciences-Po Lyon. He is past president of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section and an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Rudalevige has written extensively on questions of presidential power and interbranch relations for both academic and popular audiences. The New Imperial Presidency (University of Michigan Press, 2006) examined the post-Watergate growth of executive authority, not least in the global war on terror, and was described by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as “a grand sequel for my own The Imperial Presidency.” Other books include By Executive Order (Princeton University Press, 2021), which won the Richard E. Neustadt Prize from the American Political Science Association honoring the best book on the presidency, as well as the Louis Brownlow Prize as best book in public administration from the National Academy of Public Administration; Managing the President’s Program (Princeton University Press, 2002), which also won the Neustadt Prize; the co-authored textbook The Politics of the Presidency (11th ed., CQ/Sage, 2024); and edited volumes on the Bush, Obama and Trump presidencies. 

His assessment of ongoing political events and their relation to political science research features regularly on various media outlets, including The Washington Post’’s Monkey Cage blog and its successor site, Good Authority. Earlier in his career, Rudalevige worked in state and local politics in his home state of Massachusetts.


Sharece Thrower

Sharece Thrower

Vanderbilt University
Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor

Presentation Title:
“Is Ambition Enough to Counteract Ambition? The Role of Institutional Capacity in Constraining Executive Power”

Sharece Thrower is an associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include American political institutions, separation of powers politics, inter-branch policymaking, executive powerand representation. She is a co-author of the book Checks in the Balance: Legislative Capacity and the Dynamics of Executive Power (Princeton University Press, 2022), which received the 2022 Alan Rosenthal Prize and the 2023 Richard E. Neustadt Award. 

Prior to arriving at Vanderbilt, Thrower was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her doctorate in politics from Princeton University in 2013 and her bachelor of arts degree in political science and economics from The Ohio State University in 2008.