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The Iowa City Foreign Relations Council and Prairie Lights Books invite you to join Prof. David Driesen as he analyzes the chief executive's role in the democratic decline of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey.

Driesen argues that an insufficiently constrained presidency is one of the most important systemic threats to democracy. The experiences in these countries suggest that the U.S. Supreme Court must eschew its reliance on and expansion of the "unitary executive theory" and apply a less deferential approach to presidential invocation of authority. Ultimately, concern about loss of democracy should play a major role in the Court's jurisprudence because loss of democracy can prove irreversible.

Professor David M. Driesen, University Professor Emeritus at the Syracuse University College of Law, focuses on constitutional law, law and economics, and environmental law. Professor Driesen has written four books: The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power (Stanford University Press) The Economic Dynamics of Law (Cambridge University Press), the textbook Environmental Law: A Conceptual and Pragmatic Approach (Aspen Kluwer with Robert Adler and Kirsten Engel) and The Economic Dynamics of Environmental Law (MIT Press), which won the Lynton Keith Caldwell Award—a prize offered by The American Political Science Association annually for the best book published in science, technology, and environmental studies.

His full biography can be found at this link: https://law.syracuse.edu/deans-faculty/emeriti/david-m-driesen/