Professors Sai Prakash and Victoria Nourse join Judge Jennifer Mascott to debate Trump v. Slaughter and one of the central questions of modern separation-of-powers law: how much control does the President have over executive-branch officers?

Prakash defends the Court’s decision, arguing that the Article II Vesting Clause gives the President constitutional authority to supervise and remove officers who exercise executive power, and that Congress lacks authority to strip that power away. Drawing on founding-era practice, the First Congress, and early presidential removals, he argues that presidential control over executive officers is deeply rooted in the original constitutional structure.

Nourse challenges that account, emphasizing Congress’s constitutional role in creating offices and structuring the federal government. She argues that the Court’s increasingly expansive conception of presidential control is difficult to square with the Appointments Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and early congressional practice involving commissions and other institutions designed to exercise a degree of independence from direct political control.

The discussion explores Myers v. United States, Humphrey’s Executor, the Decision of 1789, founding-era commissions, the FTC, administrative law judges, removal protections, presidential supervision, and the broader implications of the Court’s growing unitary-executive doctrine.

Recorded October 28, 2026, at Georgetown University Law Center as part of the Daniel Webster Debate Series, in cooperation with the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.

Scott MacGuidwin, Non-Resident Fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, joins the Georgetown Law Federalist Society to challenge the conventional historical account of mootness doctrine.

Tracing the doctrine from seventeenth-century England through the Founding and early American practice, MacGuidwin argues that the traditional judicial concern was not with mootness as such, but with judges prejudging disputes before a concrete case was properly before them. He examines episodes involving Sir Edward Coke, Lord Mansfield, Revolutionary War pensions, Citizen Genêt and French privateers, and the early Supreme Court’s refusal to issue advisory opinions.

MacGuidwin contends that once a genuine case or controversy properly begins, later mootness should not necessarily create a constitutional bar to decision. Instead, he argues that mootness is better understood as a prudential or statutory doctrine—one that Congress could shape and courts could apply more transparently.

The discussion concludes with questions about declaratory judgments, capable-of-repetition exceptions, judicial resources, state-court approaches, and what a historically grounded mootness doctrine would look like in practice.

Recorded October 27, 2026, at Georgetown University Law Center.

Professors Ilya Somin and Chad Squitieri debate whether the Supreme Court’s Major Questions Doctrine can be reconciled with textualism in the latest installment of the Georgetown Law Federalist Society’s Daniel Webster Debate Series.

Somin defends the doctrine as both an ordinary tool of textual interpretation and an important safeguard against executive assertions of sweeping power without clear congressional authorization. Drawing on recent disputes involving tariffs, student-loan forgiveness, environmental regulation, and pandemic measures, he argues that major grants of authority should require correspondingly clear statutory language.

Squitieri challenges the leading textualist defenses of the doctrine, arguing that they insufficiently account for the President’s constitutional role in the federal lawmaking process. He contends that the doctrine improperly privileges Congress when statutes are ordinarily the product of both Congress and the President, while suggesting that a reinvigorated nondelegation doctrine may offer a more coherent way to police executive lawmaking.

The discussion also examines Justice Barrett’s “babysitter” analogy, Justice Gorsuch’s separation-of-powers theory, the relationship between the Major Questions and nondelegation doctrines, presidential influence over legislation, and whether courts should alter their interpretive approach based on the political or economic significance of a case.

Recorded October 21, 2026, at Georgetown University Law Center as part of the Daniel Webster Debate Series, in cooperation with the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.