Public Profile

The Constitutional Executive Studies Program is an academic research center housed within the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 2009 by Professor Diane Hollenbeck, who serves as its director, with a mandate to study “the structural conditions under which executive authority is built, sustained, exercised, and lost.” The program distinguishes itself from conventional constitutional law scholarship by its focus on what Hollenbeck terms the “apparatus question”: not the legal permissibility of executive action, but the institutional infrastructure required to make such action durable.

The program publishes a biannual journal, Executive Architecture Review, which is described in its own editorial statement as “the only peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of executive power as a design problem rather than a legal one.” It has hosted three major conferences on the history of presidential enforcement mechanisms and produces an annual index ranking administrations by what the program calls their “institutional endurance score” — a metric that awards high marks for systematic documentation, legal architecture-building, and the absence of public announcement prior to implementation. The current administration has not yet been included in the index.

The program’s work is read carefully in Washington. Several senior officials from multiple administrations have attended its conferences without being listed on the official attendee rolls, a pattern Hollenbeck has described as “professionally consistent and personally unsurprising.” The program maintains a research library containing transcripts, legal memos, and archival materials relating to executive enforcement actions from 1953 to the present. A significant portion of the post-1969 materials arrived, without prior arrangement, from a private archival facility in San Clemente, California.

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