Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Integrative Research Institute Law & Society (LSI)

In 1952, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision that would shape discussions of the separation of powers in the US for more than half a century. Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer became famous not for its majority opinion, but for an influential concurrence by Justice Robert Jackson, specifying Congressional limits on executive power. Jackson, who had served at President Franklin Roosevelt’s attorney general and had in that role supported an expansive view of executive power, modified his view in light of his experience as the chief US prosecutor at the first Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals.

In this conversation, Weissmann and Scheppele will discuss the influence of Jackson’s international experience on his views about US separation of powers, and then fast-forward to the present in which the current US President, Donald Trump, has taken aim at the Youngstown framework by advocating a “unitary executive” view of presidential power. If accepted by the Supreme Court – and there is every sign that the Court is sympathetic to this view – Trump will have brought about a constitutional revolution.

ANDREW WEISSMANN is professor of the practice of law at New York University Law School.  He served as a lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office (2017-19) and as Chief of the Fraud Section in the Department of Justice (2015-2019). From 2011 to 2013, Weissmann served as the General Counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Weissmann was a federal prosecutor for 15 years in the Eastern District of New York, where he served as the Chief of the Criminal Division. He prosecuted numerous members of the Colombo, Gambino, and Genovese families, including the bosses of the Colombo and Genovese families.  Andrew is the co-host of the popular podcast Main Justice and is a frequent legal analyst for NBC/MSNBC. His memoir about the Special Counsel investigation, Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation , was a New York Times bestseller. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from Columbia Law School. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University and attended the University of Geneva on a Fulbright Fellowship.

KIM LANE SCHEPPELE is the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Law and Normative Thinking at the University Center for Human Values.    Before coming to Princeton in 2005, she taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and Central European University, Budapest, where she was the founding codirector of the gender program.  Scheppele is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Comparative Law.  In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for influential scholarship and in 2024, she received a Guggenheim fellowship.   She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law, elected as a “global jurist” and from 2017-2019, she was the President of the Law and Society Association.  Her forthcoming book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.