Today, the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy granted its 2024 Award for Excellence in Oversight Research to “Common Law Executive Privilege(s),” by Jonathan Shaub, Norman & Carole Harned Associate Professor of Law & Public Policy at University of Kentucky’s Rosenberg College of Law. Chosen by a selection committee composed of law and political science oversight scholars and veteran practitioners, the award-winning paper emerged from a competitive field of excellent candidate papers. The award includes a $2,500 cash prize.
“The Levin Center is honored to bestow its 2024 award on an insightful, thought-provoking research paper that challenges executive branch efforts to portray executive privilege as a constitutional limit on congressional oversight instead of a practical, common law privilege created by the courts to resolve information disputes between Congress and the president,” said Jim Townsend, director of the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy. “Fifty years after the Supreme Court issued its twin Watergate decisions, the paper unpacks their facts, reasoning, and legal basis to show how the executive branch has increasingly misinterpreted the cases to try to deny information to Congress. The paper highlights legal issues that go to the heart of our system of checks and balances.”
The selection committee found that Professor Shaub’s paper offered a well-sourced, careful analysis of common law evidentiary privileges and two key 1974 cases, United States v. Nixon and Senate Select Committee v. Nixon, in which the Supreme Court ordered the Nixon Administration to turn over recorded Oval Office conversations to a special criminal prosecutor but denied them to the Senate Watergate Committee, in part because tapes had already been provided to a House committee conducting impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. The selection committee noted how the paper tracked the executive branch’s broadening interpretation of the cases over the ensuing five decades to justify refusing to produce information to Congress, and Congress’s escalating responses.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award for my forthcoming article from the Levin Center,” said Professor Shaub. “When I originally began working on congressional oversight matters at the Department of Justice, I recognized a dearth of scholarship about congressional oversight and a lack of public appreciation for the importance of oversight to the functioning of our government. The Levin Center has stepped into that gap and created an invaluable community to help encourage scholarship in this area and promote the core values of congressional oversight, and I benefit from its activities and resources on a daily basis. This recognition is exceptionally meaningful to me as an affirmation of my goals as a scholar.”
Paper Presentation - October 22, 2024 at 12:15 p.m.
Professor Jonathan Shaub will present his winning paper in a Zoom Webinar followed by discussion and Q&A. RSVP below and stay tuned for more details!
Meet the Award Winner
Professor Jonathan David Shaub joined University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020 and now serves as the Norman and Carole Harned Associate Professor of Law and Public Policy. Shaub’s research focuses on the Constitution’s separation of powers, executive privilege, presidential power, government accountability, transparency, and congressional oversight, and he teaches courses in constitutional law and federal courts, and offers a seminar on presidential and executive power. Before joining the Rosenberg College of Law, Shaub served in both federal and state government.
He earned his law degree from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and his B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Vanderbilt University. Additionally, Shaub holds an M.A. in creative writing from Belmont University.
