Pulitzer-prize winning historian and legal scholar Jack Rakove will question the Bush Administration's interpretation of executive powers during wartime in the second annual Philip Pro Lectureship in Legal History at UNLV on March 27. His lecture, "Presidential Commander: Constitutional Myth, Political Reality," will be held at 7 p.m. in Room 102 of UNLV's Boyd School of Law. It is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.
Rakove, who is widely considered to be the preeminent historian of the creation of the U.S. Constitution, has served on the faculty at Stanford University since 1980, where he currently holds the William Robertson Coe Professorship of History and American Studies, and serves as professor of political science and (by courtesy) of law. In 1997, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history for his book "Original Meaning: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution."
Rakove is also the lead author of a historians' brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the current case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.