Abstract
One of the most contested questions of constitutional law after September 11 has been the meaning of Article II, Section 2’s first clause: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”1 This chapter aims to answer three questions: What disputes over the meaning of the so-called Commander-in-Chief Clause did post-9/11 policies and practices incite? Why did such controversies arise? And, how will such debates about the Commander-in-Chief Clause’s meaning likely be settled in the future?
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Notes
Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Sector urn: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985), 247
Alexander Hamilton, Tames Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York, Mentor, 1961).
David Luban, “On the Commander in Chief Power,” Southern California Law Review 81 (2008): 477.
See generally Tuan Linz, “The Perils of Présidentialisme/o.ürwa/o/Democracy 1 (Winter 1990): 51.
Important examples include John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1993)
Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004)
Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War (Urbana: The University of Illinois, 1989).
For this history and an argument supporting noncompliance, see Tohn C. Yoo, “The Constitution of Politics by Other Means: The Original Understanding of the War Powers,” California Law Review 84 (1996): 167
Raymond Yingling and Robert W Ginnane, “The Geneva Conventions of 1949,” American lour nal of International Law 45 (1951): 407.
Carolyn A. Edie, “Tactics and Strategies: Parliament’s Attack upon the Royal Dispensing Power 1597–1689,” American Journal of Legal History, 29 (1985), 197.
Memorandum from Tay S. Bybee for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, “Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§2340–2340A,” August 1, 2002, in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 149.
Randolph D. Moss, “Executive Branch Legal Interpretation: A Perspective from the Office of Legal Counsel,” Administrative Law Review 52 (2000): 1303.
David J. Barron and Martin S. Lederman, “The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb—A Constitutional History,” Harvard Law Review 2121 (2008): 941
The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has succinctly outlined the challenges involved. David W. Barno, “Challenges in Fighting a Global Insurgency,” Parameters 36 (2006): 15.
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 319–320.
Jack L. Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (New York: W.W Norton, 2007), 187
See Harold Hongju Koh, The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power after the Jran-Contra Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 113–116
Nixon quoted in Derek Tinks and David Sloss, “Is the President Bound by the Geneva Conventions?” Cornell Law Review 90 (2004): 97
The argument is rehearsed in nontechnical terms in Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New York: New Press, 2007), 151–184.
For example, see John Yoo, “Transferring Terrorists,” Notre Dame Law Review 79 (2004): 1183
One of the most interesting treatments of this problem is Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1993).
See Bruce Ackerman, “The Living Constitution,” Harvard Law Review 120 (2007): 1737.
Neal Katyal, “Internal Separation of Powers: Checking Today’s Most Dangerous Branch from within,” Yale Law journal 115 (2006): 2314
See Mark Mazzetti, “Spymaster Tells Size of Secret Spy Force,” New York Times, April 21, 2006, A21; Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (Washington: CQ Press, 2000), 24–39.
Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 43.
Elena Kagan, “Presidential Administration,” Harvard Law Review 114 (2001): 2245
William G. Howell, Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–7.
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© 2009 Matthew J. Morgan
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Huq, A.Z. (2009). The Commander-in-Chief after 9/11. In: Morgan, M.J. (eds) The Impact of 9/11 and the New Legal Landscape. The Day that Changed Everything?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100053_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100053_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37528-8
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