Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This event is organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.
Speaker: Professor Aziz Huq (University of Chicago)
Chair: Professor Erin Delaney (UCL Laws)
About the talk
The first hundred days of the second Trump Administration have, by the White House’s own account, forced to the surface a stunningly vast range of novel and difficult legal questions. Many of these sound in constitutional doctrine or the norms underpinning such rules. The president’s sweeping use of executive orders to eliminate personnel and change patterns of congressionally mandated spending, for example, raises questions about the balance of fiscal authority between Congress and the executive, questions not seriously considered since the early 1970s, and questions about how that balance is sustained. Firings of senior officials, including those sheltered by “good cause” statutory entitlements, press on the scope and effects of the “unitary executive” theory of Article II. The use of new immigration authorities, including an effort to reopen the Cuban facility at Guantanamo Bay and an invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, implicates challenges to due process and habeas corpus norms; other immigration actions (and more) trench on federalism values. The White House’s effort to jolt the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision away from its longstanding status quo raises not just a constitutional law question, but a foundational question, sounding in political morality, as to the scope and nature of our polity. And of course, there is the (hardly minor) matter of whether and why government officials who heap public condemnation on federal judges will comply with those judges’ ordinarily binding orders. This talk offers an overview of these and other changes, and asks: Is this a “real” moment of constitutional change in the United States? And if so, what is the new constitutional dispensation?
This event is organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.
Speaker: Professor Aziz Huq (University of Chicago)
Chair: Professor Erin Delaney (UCL Laws)
About the talk
The first hundred days of the second Trump Administration have, by the White House’s own account, forced to the surface a stunningly vast range of novel and difficult legal questions. Many of these sound in constitutional doctrine or the norms underpinning such rules. The president’s sweeping use of executive orders to eliminate personnel and change patterns of congressionally mandated spending, for example, raises questions about the balance of fiscal authority between Congress and the executive, questions not seriously considered since the early 1970s, and questions about how that balance is sustained. Firings of senior officials, including those sheltered by “good cause” statutory entitlements, press on the scope and effects of the “unitary executive” theory of Article II. The use of new immigration authorities, including an effort to reopen the Cuban facility at Guantanamo Bay and an invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, implicates challenges to due process and habeas corpus norms; other immigration actions (and more) trench on federalism values. The White House’s effort to jolt the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision away from its longstanding status quo raises not just a constitutional law question, but a foundational question, sounding in political morality, as to the scope and nature of our polity. And of course, there is the (hardly minor) matter of whether and why government officials who heap public condemnation on federal judges will comply with those judges’ ordinarily binding orders. This talk offers an overview of these and other changes, and asks: Is this a “real” moment of constitutional change in the United States? And if so, what is the new constitutional dispensation?
