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 senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on American constitutionalism. Concurrently, he codirects the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.
Adam J. White
Adam J. White is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on American constitutionalism, the Supreme Court, and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.
Mr. White previously practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and the environment, finance, and telecommunications. He was a research fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow for the Manhattan Institute. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
The author of a wide range of essays, book reviews, law review articles, and book chapters, Mr. White has appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Affairs, Commentary, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and the Notre Dame Law Review. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s “Notice and Comment” blog, and for many years he was one of The Weekly Standard’s primary writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified before a variety of US House and US Senate committees, including the Senate Judiciary Committee; the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial, and Antitrust Law (currently known as the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law); the Senate Commerce Committee; and the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
In 2017 he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the boards of two nonprofit organizations: Speech First and the Land Conservation Assistance Network.
He has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
