The Yale Law Journal will host a symposium on executive power on March 24-25. The symposium will focus on the nature of executive power at the federal, state, and local levels. From the response to Hurricane Katrina to the controversies over NSA wiretapping, theories of executive power have moved over the past year from the academy to the headlines. We are proud to kick off the symposium on The Pocket Part with contributions from five authors who were asked to reflect on “2005: The Year of the Executive.”

In an uncertain world, crisis demands executive action. And so 2005, a year of crisis, became a year of executive muscle-flexing, in response to crises ranging from Hurricane Katrina to avian flu to the Global War on Terror. In many ways, the legal debates generated were déjà vu all over again. Exorbitant claims of executive power in the War on Terror triggered the strongest clash since the Iran-Contra Affair between a constitutional vision of unchecked executive discretion bottomed on sweeping dicta in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. and a counter-vision of shared institutional powers symbolized by Justice Jackson’s canonical concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer: a clash of visions I discussed more than fifteen years ago.