Welcome to our second symposium of the month!* We close out October with a series of essays reacting to Prof. Andrew Rudalevige‘s By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power (Princeton University Press 2021).

If we know anything about executive orders, it’s that they’re actions that the president takes alone. But who actually writes and reviews them, and how might that influence them? By Executive Order zooms in on what has evolved to be an elaborate and largely unobserved process behind most executive orders, presidential interest in having such a process, and the bureaucratic politics that manifest therein.

I’ll write more about By Executive Order a little later on. For now, I’m so pleased to kick off this symposium on a topic that is only becoming more relevant in the modern, go-it-alone presidency. Over the next two weeks you’ll see posts from a mixture of academics and practitioners, lawyers and political scientists, representing views on and off a wide range of the ideological spectrum. Please join us for a wide-ranging conversation about this powerful tool of the presidency: the executive order.

* Earlier this month we published a fantastic symposium on Reviving Rationality by Mike Livermore and Ricky Revesz.