Gender violence expert professor Donna Coker breaks down how proposed cuts to federal food and health programs shift costs to states and disproportionately harm women and victims of domestic violence. Recorded November 3, 2025.

Episode 8 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features Professor Zachary Price, one the leading U.S. authorities on the subject of impoundments and other fiscal control strategies.

Zachary Price holds the Eucalyptus Foundation Endowed Chair at UC Law in San Francisco. His work ranges from constitutional law and administrative law to criminal and civil law enforcement. His recent scholarly work focuses on constitutional questions generated by current political polarization. Professor Price’s book "Constitutional Symmetry: Judging in a Divided Republic" was published in 2024.

His scholarly articles have been published in the Stanford Law Review Online, the Georgetown Law Journal Online, the Georgia Law Review, the Texas Law Review, twice in the Vanderbilt Law Review, and in the New York University Law Review Online.

Professor Price has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Scotusblog, Notice and Comment, Administrative and Regulatory News, Law and Liberty, Balkinization, the Supreme Court of California Blog, the State and Local Government Blog, and the Take Care Blog.

In fall 2023, Professor Price was the Bruce Bromley Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He has also held a fellowship at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. Before entering teaching Prof. Price served for three years as an attorney in the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

He has also worked as a litigator in private practice and clerked for Judge Catherine C. Blake of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Professor Price graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude and from Stanford University with honors and distinction. Between college and law school, he studied philosophy as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen and worked for a Member of Congress.

Episode 7 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features Thomas Berry , director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Before joining Cato, he was an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

While at Cato, Mr. Berry co-authored a Supreme Court amicus brief in a case involving whether “disparaging” terms can be trademarked, that George Will described as “amusing.” The case concerned whether the name of an Asian American rock band, The Slants, could be trademarked. Berry’s team titled its submission, "Brief of the Cato Institute and a Basket of Deplorable People and Organizations." In that case, the Supreme Court, per Justice Alito, liberalized trademark registration law by holding that the disparagement exception in the Lanham Act was facially unconstitutional.

His academic work has appeared in NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, Washington and Lee Law Review Online, and Federalist Society Review. His popular writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Law Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, National Review Online, and The Hill Online. He has testified before the U.S. Senate, and his work has been cited by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Mr. Berry holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he was a senior editor on the Stanford Law and Policy Review and a Bradley Student Fellow in the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. He graduated with a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Santa Fe.

During law school, Mr. Berry interned at both Cato and the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm in Arlington, Virginia.

Mr. Berry is widely acknowledged as a leading authority on the Vacancies act which is the focus of this talk today.

Episode 6 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features Cody Wofsy. Currently he is the Deputy Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project where his work focuses on limiting state and local entanglement with immigration enforcement, protecting access to asylum, ensuring judicial review, and challenging abusive federal enforcement practices.

He is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before his work at the ACLU, he was a law clerk to Judge Marsha Berzon of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. He then won a Skadden fellowship which he spent working the with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project.

He has litigated numerous cases at all levels of federal and state courts, including blocking asylum bans, limiting the use of immigration detainers, challenging the Muslim Ban, and curtailing unlawful expedited removal practices. Recently he has also been lead counsel in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s claim that the long-running understanding of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment is mistaken: according to the Justice Department, children born in the U.S. whose parents are persons who are not domiciled in the U.S. are not in fact entitled to U.S. Citizenship.

He spoke to students in the seminar about Immigration Control and Rendition under the Trump Administration. Uniquely among the speakers in our seminar series, he exercised his privilege to ask that we not publish his talk in order to avoid telegraphing any litigation strategy to opposing parties who might be watching.

Episode 5 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. Professor Koh graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, with a major in Government. He studied at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, then went back to Harvard for his J.D. Next, he clerked on the D.C. Circuit for Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey and for Supreme Court justice Harry A. Blackmun, then worked Covington & Burling and for the Department of Justice. Professor Koh has spent much of his career teaching at Yale Law, starting in 1985. Eventually his colleagues made him the Dean of Yale Law School. Among his notable achievements there was leading a group of students in the Human Rights Clinic in litigation against the US government’s detainment of Hattian refugees in Guantanamo. His team won the case 8-1 in the Supreme Court, Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, and the detainees were released in 1993. Professor Koh’s talk concerns administration assertions of emergency power, with particular reference to invocations of the Alien Enemies Act. Professor Koh has chosen to teach Socratically, so (with our students’ permission) we are making the entire two-hour session available publicly. Professor Koh framed his introduction around the thesis of his most recent book, The National Security Constitution (Yale Press 2024). Although that book ended with the Iran-Contra affair, the issues raised then are very similar to what we see now: The fundamental problem is the erroneous belief that the President has all the authority, or illimitable authority, over foreign affairs. Administrations tend to assert, based on United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp, 399 U.S. 304 (1936), that the president is the sole master of the foreign affairs power. But the correct approach is the tri-partite framework Justice Jackson put forward only 16 years later in his concurrence to Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co v Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). (That case too involved foreign affairs, as President Truman sought to seize steel mills to support the war effort in Korea.) Justice Jackson distinguished between matters where the President acts with Congress, and his authority is at a maximum; if Congress is silent then the President has only whatever inherent powers are relevant; but if Congress has spoken contrary to the President’s actions, then “his power is at its lowest ebb”.) By the 1980s, the “perversion” of foreign policy showed that there was a major problem with executive overreach. This despite Congressional attempts after the Vietnam War to reign in the President via statutes such as the War Powers Act and the International Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). IEEPA and some other statutes create special Presidential powers in emergencies. But for Trump suddenly everything is an emergency. Congress has not reacted. Yes, it takes a majority to act, but what’s interesting is that they are not even trying; instead, they hide from angry voters at home and cancel town meetings. Gone are the days when leaders in Congress told Presidents things they did not want to hear. The Courts too are not checking the President, but rather rubber-stamping the executive. After some more detailed analysis of why current claims of emergency are unfounded, Professor Koh ended on a somewhat optimistic note. Yes, we do have a constitutional crisis, as we are going to be deciding whether President Trump can nullify the rule of law for his own benefit. But it’s not over for the Supreme Court – this is the decisive year, and there some reasons to hope that there might be six votes to re-right the balance. The critical vote, Professor Koh suggested, is Chief Justice John Roberts. What the Court does this year likely will determine his place in history, and it’s unlikely he wants to join Chief Justice Rober B. Taney, whose legacy is defined by the Dred Scott decision.

Episode 4 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features Ilya Somin, Professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights. He is a prolific writer: In addition to writing many academic articles, he is the author of four books, and co-author of two more including author of:

• Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom ,

• Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter , and

• The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain

• And co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

He is a regular contributor at Reason.com where in addition to arguing for constitutional fidelity, he takes what Professor Foomkin, organizer of the seminar series, calls "a very principled and consistently libertarian perspective on issues like takings, ‘foot voting’ and the harms caused by restrictive laws such as zoning and licensing of trades and professions."

Professor Somin is not just a scholar and very significant public intellectual; he’s also an effective advocate in court. He has been involved in the litigation concerning the Trump tariffs since its outset. His recent victory in the Federal Circuit will be reviewed by the Supreme Court in an expedited calendar which will have oral argument sometime during the week beginning November 3. Meanwhile the tariffs remain in place.

Episode 3 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features features Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School. He is one of the giants of legal theory in the US academy. His extensive career ranges from clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to his current status as a professor at Harvard Law. He has made major contribution to the study of constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law. His research includes studies of constitutional review in the United States and around the world, and the creation of other “institutions for protecting constitutional democracy.” He has written extensively in legal and particularly constitutional history, with works on the development of civil rights law in the United States and a history of the Supreme Court in the 1930s. Of note is his important work in the Critical Legal Studies movement—first in helping form the theory, then in both explaining it to the legal community, and also in some cases providing internal critique and exposition. Currently Professor Tushnet is working on several short pieces on authoritarianism and the law.

In this lecture, Professor Tushnet outlines the concept of “Constitutional Hardball” – something perhaps distinct from a ‘constitutional crisis’ -- a concept he first identified, and then developed in conversation with Jack Balkin, Sandy Levinson, and others.

Mark Tushnet outlines his theory of constitutional hardball. The key concept is that many constitutional practices are based on long-standing norms, not constitutional text. These norms can change and evolve, especially in periods of stress. And Presidents seeking to advance their agendas can push past limits set by norms without necessarily violating any written constitutional provisions. The tendency is that when a norm breaks to serve the interest of one political party, even when a different party takes power the norm is rarely if ever restored—although Tushnet notes that an exception is the two-term limit for Presidents, which was a tradition started by George Washington and then broken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt—only to be restored via the 22nd Amendment.)

Critically, while hardball pushes legal limits, and may involve controversial or disputed interpretations of Constitutional law, it clothes itself (arguably justly) in legality. Professor Tushnet argues that, so far at least, most of the Trump administration’s controversial actions are hardball; he therefore questions whether calling our current moment is not most usefully termed a ‘Constitutional crisis’.

Indeed, constitutional hardball is not, he argues, inherently bad. It can be a way to adapt a governmental structure to changing times and urgent needs. In normal times, the risk that once it gets into power the other party will exercise new power claimed by the executive also serves as a check, a form of tit-for-tat as described in game theoretic solutions to the prisoner’s dilemma. To the extent that the executive overreaches anyway, we have multiple mechanisms to push back including pressure from civil society, electoral pressure, and especially pressure or even noncompliance by states as they have great influence in a federal structure.

Episode 2 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features Peter Shane, the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. He joins us to discuss the legal theory at the heart of legal claims for expanded Presidential power, the Unitary Executive theory. After setting out the basis for the view that the Constitution gives the President such sweeping control of government as to prevent most Congressional attempts to structure and control it, Professor Shane offers his critique on both originalist and textualist grounds.

Peter Shane is a towering figure in US constitutional and administrative law. He’s served in the Executive Branch, at the Administrative Conference of the US, been a law school Dean, visited at many law schools, and recently finished a term on the Board of Directors of the American Constitution Society. He is the author of a book on separation of powers, Madison’s Nightmare: Executive Power and the Threat to American Democracy – published in 2009, making it truly timely and indeed prescient. In this lecture he lays out the roots of the Unitary Executive theory, notably a reading of Art. II, Sec 1 of the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s 1926 Myers decision by Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft. Professor Shane then explains why he believes the Unitary Executive theory is fundamentally mistaken based on both history and text of the Constitution. The Framers did not want government by committee, so they wanted a single and effective executive, but they clearly intended, Shane argues, for Congress to have powers to structure and in some ways limit the executive branch—a view supported by early practice and by considering the import of language beyond the start of Art. II and also parts of Art. I, which empowers Congress.

Episode 1 of the University of Miami School of Law's Constitutional Crisis Seminar features Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and Director of the Program in Law and Normative Thinking at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is one the leading experts on how democracies become autocracies and provides a checklist of factors that signal a slide from democracy to authoritarianism. In recent months, the U.S. has checked all, or nearly all, of the boxes. This wide-ranging lecture beautifully tees up the more specific topics in the weeks to come. Among the signs to watch for are: capture the legislature, claim emergency powers, capture the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and place loyalists in “independent” regulatory bodies. Use law to harass opponents, and seek to control or diminish the role of civil society including universities. Eventually the autocrat enables or encourages private violence, and then rewrites election laws to stay in power. Professor Scheppele then looks at how recent developments in the U.S. enact all or most of these factors. She concludes by suggesting that modes of resistance will depend in part on federalism, and on localities, that have the means to use local law to protect democracy.

The 2025 Constitution Crisis Seminar series is organized by Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law A. Michael Froomkin. The series brings together an impressive group of leading lawyers and scholars active in writing about – and in several cases litigating – issues relating to the constitutional issues implicated by the Trump Administration’s assertive interpretation of Executive power over everything from immigration to government spending, to regulation of lawyers and universities, to the role of courts and the Constitution, and even law itself.

SEMINAR DATES, TOPICS, SPEAKERS

8/18

What is a Constitutional Crisis?

Speaker: Kim Lane Scheppele, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and Director of the Program in Law and Normative Thinking at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

8/25

Unitary Executive Theory and Its Critics

Speaker: Peter Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University

09/8

Constitutional Hardball

Speaker: Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School

09/15

Tariffs

Speaker: Ilya Somin, Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute

9/22

Assertions of Emergency Power

Speaker: Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law, Yale Law School

9/29

Immigration Control / Rendition

Speaker: Cody Wofsy, Deputy Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project (NOTE: at the speaker’s request, this recording will not be posted)

10/13

Removals of Officers & Inferior Officers, Bureaucratic Control (Schedules F & G), Vacancies Act

Speaker: Thomas A. Berry, Director, Cato Institute Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, and Editor in Chief, Cato Supreme Court Review 

10/20

Impoundments & Other Fiscal Control Strategies

Speaker:  Zachary S. Price, Professor of Law, UC Law San Francisco 

10/27

Attacks on Civil Society (Law Firms, Universities, NGOs)

Speaker:  Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law, Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar, University of Chicago Law School

11/3

Role of Courts / Attacks on Courts

Speaker: Stephen I. Vladeck, Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts, Georgetown University Law Center

11/10

(Reserved for late-breaking developments)

11/17

Formal Correctives Including Constitutional Reform

Speaker: Sanford V. Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, University of Texas Law School  

11/24

Life During a Constitutional Crisis

Speaker: Bernard E. Harcourt , Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties, Columbia Law School