Robert S. Marx Lecture 2026

Lecturer:  Julian Davis Mortenson, James G. Phillipp Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School

Friday, February 13, 2026 at 12:15 – 1:15 PM

Location: Rm. 160, UC College of Law

CLE: 1 HR of CLE in OH and KY has been approved. (in-person onl)

Zoom option available (link here): https://ucincinnati.zoom.us/meeting/register/3_POKcLGR3CssU3tgAlCnw

No CLE available for online option. 

For generations, the U.S. president has been the most powerful person on earth. And yet our understanding of presidential power at the national Founding is decidedly hazy. In a nation whose creation narrative is as central to its law and politics as to its history, modern presidents have been only too ready to capitalize on that uncertainty.

This talk is part of a larger scholarly effort to correct that state of affairs. Because in fact, the president’s defining function at the Founding was simply to execute the laws. As a law executor, the President’s importance and power were obvious. The Constitution gave him formidable independence and enormous influence in the political tug of war that would produce the laws he’d be assigned to execute. Beyond that, though, his authorities would be limited almost entirely to the implementation of instructions later produced by the legislative process.

Julian Davis Mortenson is a legal historian, constitutional litigator, and award-winning teacher who specializes in the constitutional and political history of early America. His current book project—The Founders’ President (under contract with Harvard University Press)— develops a new paradigm for understanding presidential power at the American founding. It shows that the eighteenth-century presidency functioned, not as the amorphous locus of unspecified sovereign rights, but as the rule-bounded instrument of a statutory agenda over which the president himself had enormous influence.

Mortenson has held visiting appointments on the faculties of Cambridge University, KU Leuven, and the University of Tokyo. His new textbook on constitutional law has already been widely adopted and is slated for a second edition. Mortenson’s litigation work includes his service as lead counsel in a case that required Michigan to recognize the marriages of more than 300 same-sex couples; as lead appellate counsel for the Arab-American Civil Rights League’s challenge to the Muslim ban; as advocate for discharged military service members challenging the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” law; and as a principal drafter of the merits briefs in the landmark habeas corpus case of Boumediene v. Bush.

He received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Stanford University.  Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, Mortenson worked at the law firm WilmerHale and in the President’s Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Before law school, he was a management consultant with a client portfolio spanning the finance, manufacturing, oil and gas, and information technology industries.