The Constitution, The Courts, and Conservatism
Explore the debates within conservative legal thought on the courts and the Constitution.
The seminar will focus on five landmark Supreme Court cases from the past 50 years with a view to exploring how politics and law interact, the different approaches to constitutional judgment and rhetoric, and the impact of the Court’s decisions on American lives. We will find the late Justice Antonin Scalia at the center of this discussion throughout the week, as we consider how his focus on constitutional “originalism” and the Constitution’s structural checks and balances, both rooted in his view of the courts’ properly limited role in republican government, profoundly changed the way in which Americans view the Constitution and constitutional law.
Photos from Unsplash | “Supreme Court of the United States” by Phil Roeder | Flickr, CC BY 2.0
Adam J. White explains Federalist No. 78
Faculty
Adam J. White
Adam J. White is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and an Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where he also directs the Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
Adam J. White
Adam J. White is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and an Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where he also directs the Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He writes widely on the administrative state, the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and regulatory policy, with special focus on energy policy and financial regulation.
He is a Contributing Editor with National Affairs, The New Atlantis, and City Journal, and a contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation‘s blog, “Notice and Comment.” He was recently appointed to the Administrative Conference of the United States, a federal advisory board focused on improving federal agencies’ practices. He also serves on the leadership council of the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law Section; on the executive committee of the Federalist Society’s Administrative Law Practice Group; and on the board of directors of LandCAN, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting conservation on working lands.
Prior to joining AEI, he was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In addition to his research and writing, he practiced law with Boyden Gray & Associates, writing briefs on constitutional and regulatory issues in the Supreme Court and various other federal courts. (He continues to be “of counsel” to the firm in three pending cases involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Communications Commission.) Previously, he was a Senior Associate with Baker Botts, working on various constitutional and regulatory matters, including energy infrastructure regulation.
He received his J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School, and his B.B.A. (economics) from the University of Iowa College of Business. He clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
