Executive Power and the Courts: Judicial Authority in Constitutional Crises

Professor Zackin is a 2010 Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her dissertation won the Edward S. Corwin Award for Best Dissertation Public Law and the Walter Dean Burnham Best Dissertation Award from the Politics and History section of APSA. Dr. Zackin is the co-author of "The Political Development of American Debt Relief" (University of Chicago Press, 2024) a political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief. She is also the author of “Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights” (Princeton University Press, 2013) which focuses on three political movements to add these kinds of positive rights to state constitutions. In particular, it examines the campaign for education rights, which spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the movement for positive labor rights, which occurred during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the push to add environmental bills of rights to state constitutions during the 1960s and 1970s.

Richard H. Pildes is a leading scholar of constitutional law and a specialist in the legal structure of democracy. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Guggenheim Fellow, he helped pioneer the field with his influential casebook The Law of Democracy. His work explores election law, voting rights, political polarization, campaign finance, and the design of democratic institutions.

Pildes’s scholarship has been widely cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and translated into several languages. He has successfully argued before the Court, including a landmark 2015 redistricting case, and has served in various legal roles, including advising the Obama presidential campaigns.

He earned his A.B. from Princeton and J.D. from Harvard, where he was Supreme Court Note Editor for the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall, he taught at Michigan Law before joining NYU School of Law in 2001.

Mary Bruce is the Assistant Director of Public Programs at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, a multi-disciplinary academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy by improving and expanding civic engagement and inclusive dialogue, and by supporting inquiry that leads to real-world change.  As assistant director of the SNF Agora Institute, Mary co-creates opportunities for meaningful dialogue and debate that inspire more active participation in democratic life. Throughout her career, she has worked to expand civic participation, including efforts of George HW Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. A former adjunct professor at UVA's Batten School of Leadership, Mary holds a BA in Poverty Studies from UVA and an MPA from Princeton University. She served in both the Peace Corps (Morocco) and AmeriCorps (Washington, DC). Mary’s work reflects her belief that democracy works better for everyone by combining thoughtful scholarship with practical action.