Frederick Schauer Speaks on President's Duty to Obey Law.

Professor Frederick Schauer, from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government joined Yale ACS on Thursday, Feb. 9. to deliver a talk entitled, "Should Presidents Obey the Law? Reflections on Legality and Official Duty." Prof. Schauer spoke on the rhetoric of presidential disregard of the law, and on competing claims that formal legal constraints are secondary to the demands of justice. The controversy over presidential power has echoes in official power at all levels: in controversies from Hurricane Katrina to the New York City transit strike, where Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and transit union head Roger Toussaint asserted that legality per se might not always matter. Prof. Schauer offers his reflections on these debates.

Prof. Schauer is the author of highly-recognized scholarship on constitutional law, free speech, and legal philosophy. He has worked on legal and constitutional development around the world, and his scholarship has been the subject of a book and five special issues of law journals. He is the former Chair of the Section on Constitutional Law of the Association of American Law Schools and Vice President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship