An article from the symposium issue of the Indiana Law Journal on "War, Terrorism and Torture: Limits on Presidential Power in the 21st Century." The symposium was convened by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and the Indiana University School of Law–Bloomington on October 7, 2005.

“Saikrishna Prakash’s essay […] invites further scholarship. Indeed, that is Prakash’s essential aim. He views the current heated controversy over the legality of the Bush administration’s war and anti-terrorism policies as deficient on both sides because it relies too heavily on constitutional text that alone does not detail the scope of presidential and congressional war powers or how the powers interact. Desperately needed, Prakash argues, is difficult historical research into the original meaning of the text. Because he has not conducted the research he views as essential, Prakash does not offer his own legal conclusions (and he describes some commentators who do as seeming to leap to conclusions based on policy preferences). He does, however, sketch four “hypotheses” about the constitutional allocation of presidential and congressional war powers. With care again to caution of the need to measure the hypotheses against the original understanding of the constitutional Framers, Prakash identifies what he describes as the “shared authority thesis” as the most plausible. He observes that both the Bush administration and its critics can be seen as adhering to versions of this “shared authority” approach, and he suggests that the two sides might be less far apart—at least at the level of constitutional theory—than they believe.” From Foreword by Prof. Dawn Johnsen