AREAS OF RESEARCH
Administrative Law, Constitutional Law and Theory, Election Law, Legal Ethics, National Security Law and Practice
Bob Bauer is professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at the New York University School of Law and co-director of NYU Law’s Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic. Bauer served as White House Counsel to President Obama from 2009 to 2011. In 2013, the President named him to be co-chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In 2021, President Biden named him to be co-chair of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Bob was general counsel to Obama for America, the president’s campaign organization, in 2008 and 2012. Bob has also served as co-counsel to the New Hampshire State Senate in the trial of Chief Justice David A. Brock (2000) and counsel to the Democratic leader in the trial of President William Jefferson Clinton (1999).
Bob is co-author with Jack Goldsmith of After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency (2020), books on federal campaign finance and numerous articles on law and politics for legal periodicals. He has co-authored numerous bipartisan reports on policy and legal reform, including “The American Voting Experience: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration” (Presidential Commission on Election Administration, 2014); “The State of Campaign Finance in the United States” (Bipartisan Policy Center, 2018); and “Democratizing the Debates” (Annenberg Working Group on Presidential Campaign Debate Reform, 2015). He is a Contributing Editor of Lawfare and has published opinion pieces on constitutional and political law issues in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, among other publications.
This seminar will explore major contemporary and historical controversies concerning the powers and constraints on the powers of the President. Some of the general issues studied will include the scope of unilateral executive powers; broad delegations by Congress to the President; executive privilege; the scope of congressional oversight; impeachment; the separation of powers; and the scope of judicial review of presidential actions. Readings and discussion will center on the historical development of legal doctrine on these issues and the increase in the visibility and intensity of these issues over the last several administrations. Materials will include judicial decisions as well as case studies of current and recent issues. We will examine these issues both as legal matters and from the perspective of the real-world functioning of the White House and Congress. Some of the larger themes we will explore include the growth of presidential powers over time and how presidential power should be understood in an era of highly polarized political parties. Class participation is expected. There will be no exam, but a requirement of a 20-25 paper on an approved topic related to the issues covered in the seminar.
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