On Friday, the UCLA Law Review will be hosting a terrific symposium entitled The Safeguards of Our Constitutional Republic. So if you happen to be in Southern California, definitely join us!

Here’s the description of the symposium from the law review’s website:

We find ourselves today at a political, legal, and cultural crossroad. This past year has been marked by scandals, standoffs, travesties, and tragedies. customs have been flouted; compacts broken; laws ignored; elections meddled with; and individuals and communities debased.

Radical Executive Branch policies, personnel decisions, diplomatic postures, and corrosive forms of engagement with Congress, the media, the judiciary, states and localities, and the public writ large have prompted many to ask whether we’re careening down the road to constitutional crisis.    Indeed, everywhere we look, the rule of law is being tested by a President who tries to vanquish and delegitimize political and legal rivals, advance personal and familial business interests, and promote a particularly virulent strain of nationalism.

This Symposium brings together many of the nation’s top legal scholars and some of its most adroit practicing lawyers to assess this critical, perhaps, unprecedented moment. Drawing on their professional experiences and on their studies of legal history, jurisprudence, ethics, organizational behavior, legal theory, political development, and comparative constitutionalism, participants will inquire whether we’re in a time of simple flux or full-blown crisis; whether any such crisis rises to the level of a constitutional (as opposed to just a political or cultural) dislocation; and how we can steer the ship of State back on course.

The Symposium will feature five panels focused on the challenges we face—and on the institutions and conventions we draw upon to meet these challenges.  The panels will be organized around the following lines:

• The Separation of Powers
• Federalism and State and Local Government
• The Norms and Ethics of Public Service
• The Administrative State
• Civil Society

Anchoring the day’s events will be a keynote address by the Honorable Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court.

“The Safeguards of Our Constitutional Republic” is an event organized by the UCLA Law Review and Professor Jon D. Michaels, with the assistance of Professors Kristen Eichensehr and Blake Emerson.

And here is the agenda:

Symposium Schedule

9:00-915 Welcome Remarks

9:15-10:25 Panel I: The Separation of Powers
·       Josh Chafetz, Cornell University
·       David Pozen, Columbia University
·       Aziz Huq, University of Chicago

10:35-11:45 Panel II: Federalism and the Role of State, Local, and Tribal Governments
·       David Fontana, George Washington University
·       Miriam Seifter, University of Wisconsin
·       Seth Davis, University of California, Irvine

12:00-1:30 Lunch + Keynote Address by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, California Supreme Court

1:35-2:45 Panel III: Civil Society
·       Kate Andrias, University of Michigan
·       Sabeel Rahman, Brooklyn Law School
·       Matthew Segal, ACLU

2:55-4:20 Panel IV: The Administrative State
·       Jennifer Nou, University of Chicago
·       David Super, Georgetown University
·       Paul Verkuil, Administrative Conference of the United States (ret.)
·       Christopher Walker, Ohio State University

4:30-5:40 Panel V: Norms, Ethics, and Constitutional Culture
·       Heidi Kitrosser, University of Minnesota
·       Steven Schooner, George Washington University
·       David Sklansky, Stanford University

5:45-6:00 Concluding Remarks

On the administrative law panel I’ll be talking about the phenomenon of administrative law without courts — the many ways in which federal agencies regulate/act that are insulated from judicial review.