Dr. Mark Miller of Clark University, and an alum of HPJ was recently on campus during Honors Day. He spoke to the Law College and also gave a short address at the HPJ Honors Day Program, urging students to be ready and flexible so they can take advantage of the opportunities that arise in their lives.
Below is the ONU press release about Dr. Miller and his talk.
Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law will present the
2013 Dean’s Lecture on Friday, April 26, at 4:20 p.m. in the Small Moot
Court Room. The program will feature a presentation by Dr. Mark Miller,
director of the Law and Society Program and professor of political
science at Clark University, called “Constitutional Interpretation and
Policymaking: Courts, the President, and Congress in Dialogue.”
Miller
graduated from ONU in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts in public
administration and political science. He holds a Ph.D. in political
science from Ohio State University and a J.D. from the George
Washington University College of Law. He is a former judicial fellow at
the U.S. Supreme Court and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of
Leiden. His current research interests include the interactions between
Congress and the courts, constitutional law issues involving the powers
of Congress, and comparisons of judicial politics in North America and
Western Europe.
The Governance as Dialogue Movement argues that
the U.S. Supreme Court does not necessarily have the last word on
interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Instead, constitutional meaning
comes out of an inter-institutional conversation among the courts, the
Congress, the president and other political actors. This lecture will
examine some of the recent interactions between the Congress and the
federal courts on the one hand, and between the president and the
federal courts on the other, as each institution attempts to
participate in the constitutional dialogue. At times, the relationships
between the courts and the other institutions are cooperative, but
sometimes they are highly conflictual.
While the federal courts,
and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, are clearly political
policymakers in our separation of powers system, their decision-making
is different from the other branches because the courts must justify
their decisions using legal analysis and legal reasoning. The lecture
will explore how Governance as Dialogue scholars analyze these
institutional interactions.
