Teaching the Presidency: Idealizing a Constitutional Office

Abstract

From World War II to the present, prominent scholars placed their hopes in the presidency to protect the nation from outside threats and deal effectively with domestic crises. Their theories weakened the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances by reviving an outsized trust in executive power (especially over external affairs) that William Blackstone and others promoted in eighteenth-century England. The American framers of the Constitution studied those models with great care and fully rejected those precedents when they declared their independence from England.