Brennan Center for Justice’s Liza Goitein to Deliver Constitution Day Address Goitein’s talk, titled “Presidential Emergency Powers and the Threat to Democracy,” will be delivered on Sept. 16 in Northen Auditorium.

By Brian Laubscher
August 23, 2024

Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein, senior director for the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, will deliver this year’s Constitution Day address at Washington and Lee University at 5 p.m. on Sept. 16 in Northen Auditorium. Her lecture, titled “Presidential Emergency Powers and the Threat to Democracy,” is free and open to the public.

Emergency powers are designed to give presidents the flexibility needed to respond to sudden, unforeseen crises. However, in the wrong hands, emergency powers can be used to circumvent the Constitution’s separation of powers and to undermine democracy itself.

“When both sides of the political aisle claim that electoral victory by their opponents would undermine American self-government, the temptation to abuse power looms large,” says Lucas Morel, John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics at W&L. “Elizabeth Goitein’s lecture on the threat that emergency powers pose to the constitutional separation of powers will educate scholars and citizens regardless of party affiliation.”

Goitein’s address will examine several sources of presidential emergency power, including the National Emergencies Act, the Insurrection Act and claims of inherent constitutional authority, and will focus on the risks they pose and the safeguards that could be put in place to prevent abuse.

Goitein is a nationally recognized expert on presidential emergency powers, government surveillance, and government secrecy. Her writing has been featured in major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Magazine, The New Republic and Foreign Affairs, and she has testified before Congress on several occasions.

Before her tenure with the Brennan Center for Justice, Goitein served as counsel to Senator Russ Feingold, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division in the Department of Justice. In 2021–22, she was a member of the inaugural class of Senior Practitioner Fellows at the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government.

Goitein holds a Bachelor of Arts in history from Yale University, a Master of Music from The Juilliard School and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. She went on to clerk for the Honorable Michael Daly Hawkins on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The Brennan Center for Justice is an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization founded in 1995 by former law clerks to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. as a living memorial to his ideals. The Brennan Center works to reform, revitalize and, when necessary, defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice. The organization’s Liberty & National Security Program seeks to advance effective national security policies that respect constitutional values and the rule of law.

Constitution Day commemorates the formation and signing of the U.S. Constitution and is observed on Sept. 17, the day the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787. The federal observance also recognizes those who have become U.S. citizens.