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 the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Adam J. White
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
