Experts

Saikrishna Prakash

Fast Facts

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • Domestic Affairs
  • Law and Justice
  • Governance
  • Political Parties and Movements
  • Politics
  • The Presidency
  • Supreme Court

Saikrishna Prakash, faculty senior fellow, is the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School. His scholarship focuses on separation of powers, particularly executive powers. He teaches constitutional law, foreign relations Law and presidential powers at the University of Virginia Law School.

Prakash majored in economics and political science at Stanford University. At Yale Law School, he served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the John M. Olin Fellowship in Law, Economics and Public Policy. After law school, he clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. After practicing in New York for two years, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and as an associate professor at Boston University School of Law. He then spent several years at the University of San Diego School of Law as the Herzog Research Professor of Law. Prakash has been a visiting professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and the University of Chicago Law School. He also has served as a James Madison Fellow at Princeton University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Among Prakash's articles are "50 States, 50 Attorneys General and 50 Approaches to the Duty to Defend," published in the Yale Law Journal; "The Imbecilic Executive," published in the Virginia Law Review; and "The Sweeping Domestic War Powers of Congress," published in the Michigan Law Review. He is the author of The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument against Its Ever-Expanding Powers and Imperial from the Beginning: The Constitution of the Original Executive.

Saikrishna Prakash News Feed

When the Framers gathered at Independence Hall in 1787, they confronted the task of reforming the executive branch. By the end of that typically hot, humid Philadelphia summer, they had established a unified, independent president with the power to confront the crises and challenges that would beset a great nation.
Saikrishna Prakash Philadelphia Inquirer
The president has his debt ceiling increase and there is talk that he may endorse a permanent repeal of the debt ceiling. That sets the stage for a grand bargain in which the president and Republicans can get their tax cuts and the Democrats can secure a boost in domestic spending. Leaders of the left and right have been all too ready to ignore the fiscal future when it suits their purposes, but the American people can no longer afford such beggar-thy-future schemes.
Saikrishna Prakash The Hill
The constitutional text and history regarding presidential pardons shows that Trump has the Constitution, if not the politics, about right.
John Yoo & Saikrishna Prakash
In his abbreviated first year on the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch has lived up to supporters’ greatest hopes and critics’ worst fears, writes the Miller Center's Sai Prakash in the Wall Street Journal.
Sai Prakash The Wall Street Journal
The Republican gamble to stiff-arm Merrick Garland and hold open Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat appears to have hit the jackpot. In his abbreviated first year on the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch has lived up to supporters’ greatest hopes and critics’ worst fears.
Saikrishna Prakash The Wall Street Journal
It’s possible that Trump could circumvent DOJ entirely and fire Mueller on his own. It’s not clear that Trump has any constitutional duty to adhere by a Justice Department regulation, said Saikrishna Prakash, a professor at University of Virginia Law School and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “I don’t know how a rule of the Department of Justice can limit the president’s constitutional authority,”
Saikrishna Prakash POLITICO