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

The Framers never envisioned presidents as lordly law shapers or war declarers.
Saikrishna Prakash The Hill
At issue is the already much-damaged equilibrium of the Constitution’s separation of powers. If both cases are decided correctly, the vitality of Congress will be enhanced and the pretensions of presidents will be chastened. Today’s column concerns the case involving Congress’s investigative powers. A subsequent column will address the case concerning Congress’s core power, that of controlling government’s purse strings. Tuesday’s arguments will concern standing — whether the House can seek a judicial remedy for its injuries. If it has standing, it should win on the merits. Both cases are, therefore, vital to what University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, in his just-published book, “The Living Presidency: An Originalist Argument Against Its Ever-Expanding Powers,” calls the need to “recage the executive lion.”
Saikrishna Prakash The Washington Post
Every president eventually reaches into a bag of tricks. Donald Trump is no different. On Wednesday he demanded that Congress adjourn so that he can make recess appointments—temporary appointments permissible when the Senate is recessed. If Congress fails to adjourn, he threatens to close it, using constitutional authority no president has ever deployed. The president has it right. And he has James Madison, the father of the Constitution, on his side.
Saikrishna Prakash The Wall Street Journal
American history is likewise littered with examples of Congress pushing back against executive overreach.
Modern notions of the power to declare war and of the commander in chief would astonish and dismay the Founders.
In January 2019, Miller Center senior fellow and UVA law professor Saikrishna Prakash visited the Brennan Center for Justice