Public Biography
Professor Diane Hollenbeck is the founding director of the Constitutional Executive Studies Program at Georgetown University and the author of The Architecture of Authority: Executive Power from Lincoln to the Present (Georgetown University Press, 2019) and Plenary: The Unresolved Jurisprudence of Presidential Action (2023). She holds an endowed chair in constitutional governance and has spent three decades studying the structural mechanisms by which executive administrations build, extend, and occasionally destroy their own institutional authority.
Her scholarship is unusual in the field for its focus on what she calls the “apparatus question” — not whether an administration has the legal authority to act, but whether it has constructed the machinery necessary to act durably. Her 2018 paper, “Announcement as Concession: The Strategic Cost of Transparency in Executive Enforcement,” is taught in law schools and credited, by scholars who have since cited her in their own work, as the most rigorous framework for analyzing the gap between executive ambition and executive capacity in the modern administrative state.
Hollenbeck has been cited in three Supreme Court amicus briefs, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on two occasions, and appeared in a footnote of a Ninth Circuit dissent that described her analysis as “compelling, if ultimately inapplicable to the circumstances before the court,” which she has described in interviews as “the most useful endorsement I have received.”
She has described the column “Executive Privilege,” by Richard Nixon, as “the most sustained engagement with executive prerogative in contemporary American letters, and also one of the longest.” This assessment was subsequently placed, by Mr. Nixon’s office, in the Vindicated category of the relevant database.