Sidney Seminar: Real Regime Change? The United States under the Second Trump Administration

Real Regime Change?: The United States under the Second Trump Administration

Speaker: Professor Aziz Huq (University of Chicago)

Chair: Professor Erin Delaney (UCL Laws)

About the talk

The first hundred days of the second Trump Administration have, by the White House’s own account, forced to the surface a stunningly vast range of novel and difficult legal questions. Many of these sound in constitutional doctrine or the norms underpinning such rules. The president’s sweeping use of executive orders to eliminate personnel and change patterns of congressionally mandated spending, for example, raises questions about the balance of fiscal authority between Congress and the executive, questions not seriously considered since the early 1970s, and questions about how that balance is sustained. Firings of senior officials, including those sheltered by “good cause” statutory entitlements, press on the scope and effects of the “unitary executive” theory of Article II. The use of new immigration authorities, including an effort to reopen the Cuban facility at Guantanamo Bay and an invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, implicates challenges to due process and habeas corpus norms; other immigration actions (and more) trench on federalism values. The White House’s effort to jolt the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision away from its longstanding status quo raises not just a constitutional law question, but a foundational question, sounding in political morality, as to the scope and nature of our polity.  And of course, there is the (hardly minor) matter of whether and why government officials who heap public condemnation on federal judges will comply with those judges’ ordinarily binding orders.  This talk offers an overview of these and other changes, and asks: Is this a “real” moment of constitutional change in the United States? And if so, what is the new constitutional dispensation?  

This seminar is part of the Sidney Seminar Series. Cropped image of the White House by Cezary p (licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0).

 

About the Speaker

Aziz Huq is the Frank and Bernice J. Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and associate professor in the sociology department. Before teaching, he represented civil liberties claimants with the Brennan Center for Justice, and worked for the International Crisis Group in Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. His books include How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (2018, with Tom Ginsburg), The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (2021), and The Rule of Law: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming 2024). His work on AI and constitutionalism has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Daedalus, and several other scholarly venues. 

About the Chair

Erin Delaney is Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at UCL Faculty of Laws. She is the Inaugural Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism. She retains an affiliation with Northwestern University where she was Professor of Law at the Pritzker School of Law and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Letters. 

About the GCDC

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly knowledge of democratic governance, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. As a research community with a global perspective, our key focus is understanding how to achieve constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. We are currently supported by the Leverhulme Trust.