New Law School Class Explores How President Trump Is Threatening the Constitutional Order
"The basic premise of the course is that President Trump has through his conduct and his words challenged the constitutional order in a way it has not been challenged in the last century, maybe the last two centuries," said professor David Rudenstine, a former dean at Cardozo Law.
September 06, 2019 at 02:25 PM
5 minute read
A former New York Court of Appeals judge who is a conservative Republican and a professor who is a liberal Democrat are teaching a new course at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law that examines the impact President Donald Trump is having on the Constitution.
The course concentrates on the legal issues raised by the president's constitutional challenges and is not a political science course but nevertheless it has attracted students who are not happy with the president. When asked by retired Court of Appeals Judge Robert Smith, a partner at Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman who is co-teaching the class, if anyone supported the president, no one came forward.
"I decided to take this course because it provides an opportunity to have thoughtful and meaningful conversations about what I think is the troubling behavior of our president," said Cynthia Joo Park, who is in her last year of law school. "Other than Donald Trump I have never heard of any president who asserts this blanket power to reject any request he doesn't like."
Smith, who describes himself as more conservative than the president, is not a Trump fan either. "One of my many worries about Trump is that he'll create a lot of bad law because nobody including me and including many of the federal judges he appointed has any confidence in the man or trusts him."
The course, new this semester, was conceived by David Rudenstine, the former dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, who is teaching it along with Smith. Rudenstine said the class was supposed to be a small seminar to facilitate discussion but a lot more students wanted in and so it expanded to 30.
"The basic premise of the course is that President Trump has through his conduct and his words challenged the constitutional order in a way it has not been challenged in the last century, maybe the last two centuries," Rudenstine said. "My guess is that the common ground for people is that the administration has raised a lot of constitutional issues and whether you are in favor or not you'd want to understand what's at stake."
It is not the only law school course that examines the issues through the lens of the Trump presidency. University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law is offering "Law and Lawlessness in the Age of Trump" this semester. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe taught "Constitutional Law 3.0: The Trump Trajectory" in the spring of 2018. And the University of Washington School of Law was one of the first to offer a Trump course shortly after his election, "Executive Power and Its Limits."
At the Cardozo class' first meeting Aug. 28, students discussed Department of Commerce v. New York, the census case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 27.
"We read the Supreme Court opinion and concurrents and dissents, I think that the questions the professor made us really think about were really important," Park said.
Students were asked: How do the claims differ from one another? What information is relevant to each claim? How do the justices differ from one another in their assessment of each claim? And in the end, how would you decide the case? They also discussed speculation by court watchers that Chief Justice John Roberts changed his mind on the outcome as he was writing his opinion.
"The suspicion is based on the assumption that the chief justice would be strongly inclined to be exceedingly deferential to the president on whether a citizenship question may be included in the 2020 census, and thus to vote to permit the question to be included," Rudenstine explained to the students.
Upcoming topics include suing a president for his conduct prior to taking office, the scope of the president's pardon power, the scope of the emolument clauses, impeachment, obstruction of justice and post-presidency prosecution. And the class will spend two sessions looking at Trump's treatment of the press.
Rudenstine was asked why this president has generated so much attention from law schools.
"I'm well aware that presidents in recent years have challenged the constitution," Rudenstine replied. "What sets President Trump apart is the number of ways he's challenged the constitutional order."
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