Legal Commentary

I wrote a while back about how timely a moment it is for legal scholars to think about the nature of presidential transitions, and the questions of constitutional and administrative law and policy that surround them.  I'm very grateful to the Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy for publishing my thoughts on the relationship between the Presidential Oath Clause and presidential transitions, Honor's Constitutional Moment: The Oath and Presidential Transitions.  (That's the final PDF version; it's also available in HTML here.  A somewhat longer version -- less graceful than the final version, which was very thoughtfully edited by the folks at Colloquy, but slightly more detailed -- is available on SSRN here.) 

I know from private correspondence that not everyone will agree with what I have to say, but I hope to contribute something to an understanding of the Presidential Oath Clause and its implications for executive constitutional interpretation.  I'll be at work this spring on a paper about the federal judicial oath, so in a sense this is a preface to broader work on the role of the oath in constitutional law -- and, I hope, on the role of virtue and virtue ethics in thinking about constitutional interpretation and various constitutional actors, a subject I broach in this review, and that has been discused very effectively by Larry Solum.  As always, comments are welcome; the nice thing about this being an ongoing work is that if you didn't convince me on this go-around, there's always the next.

Let me add that mine is not the last word on the subject.  The Colloquy, proving the worth of online law review supplements in providing a forum for timely discussion of important legal issues that don't have to follow a long publication schedule, will be publishing several other works on the subject in the coming weeks.  I'm an interested party, but I applaud the Colloquy editors' work on this issue and I hope that those who are interested in the law of presidential transitions will visit their site early and often.