An important examination of the legislative veto and the ongoing battle between the executive and the legislature to control policy

Author Jessica Korn challenges the notion that the 18th-century principles underlying the American separation of powers system are incompatible with the demands of 20th-century governance by questioning the dominant scholarship on the legislative veto. Korn's analysis shows that commentators have exaggerated the legislative veto's significance as a result of their incorrect assumption that the separation of powers was designed solely to check governmental authority.

Offers coverage of wartime extra-legal courts. Focusing on those periods when the Constitution and civil liberties have been most severely tested by threats to national security, Fisher critiques tribunals called during the presidencies of Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Truman.

Squire offers a comprehensive history of legislatures, core institutions in American political development

"This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--

This text dissects the crucial constitutional disputes between the executive and the legislative branches of government from the Constitutional Convention to the beginning of the Bush administration. It analyzes areas of tension within a political and historical context.

This book provides a detailed historical and legal examination of presidential power and the theory of the unitary executive.