2000 Articles

The President and Choices Not to Enforce

Strauss, Peter

The executive branch is often called upon to assess how a particular statute
it is charged to administer fits within the larger framework of the law. Professor
Dawn Johnsen’s thoughtful analysis addresses an important subset of these
challenges: situations in which the President believes a particular statute is inconsistent with one or another provision of the Constitution and, therefore,
should not be enforced. My purpose here is to explore the context of executive
non-enforcement more broadly, in a way that may help in understanding the
particular problem she addresses.