Back in 2004, I started a blog, Shugerblog, to post about three big things happening that spring: 1) the campaign to defeat George W. Bush, 2) the campaign to Reverse the Curse (Red Sox!), and 3) the birth of our 2d child. We were two for three: we had a healthy baby who continues to amaze and inspire us, the Sox overcame an 0-3 hole vs. the Yankees and broke the curse, but Bush won. I offered some prescient predictions (the collapse of Howard Dean going into Iowa), a Sox comeback over the Yankees (absurdly wishful thinking that came true), and I had some clunkers (Kerry would defeat Bush). Then reality set in: being on the academic job market with two kids under three years of age. And later, I got the message at my new teaching job that blogging while being an untenured professor is a bad idea. So I even stayed off of Facebook for eight years to avoid distraction and controversy.
Well, I decided to address my election-induced insomnia and anxiety by restarting the blog. And frankly, I have tenure at a law school I LOVE after quite a bumpy ride along the way. Maybe this blog is an awesome idea. Maybe this is a terrible idea. Stay tuned!
Author: Jed Shugerman
Jed Handelsman Shugerman is a Professor and Joseph Lipsitt Scholar at Boston University School of Law. He was at Fordham Law School 2013-2022. He received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. (History) from Yale. His book, The People’s Courts (Harvard 2012), traces the rise of judicial elections, judicial review, and the influence of money and parties in American courts. It is based on his dissertation that won the 2009 ASLH’s Cromwell Prize. He is co-author of amicus briefs on the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases.
He is currently working on two books on the history of executive power and prosecution in America. The first is tentatively titled “A Faithful President: The Founders v. the Unitary Executive,” questioning the textual and historical evidence for the theory of unchecked and unbalanced presidential power. This book draws on his articles “Vesting” (Stanford Law Review forthcoming 2022), “Removal of Context” (Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 2022), a co-authored “Faithful Execution and Article II” (Harvard Law Review 2019 with Andrew Kent and Ethan Leib), “The Indecisions of 1789” (forthcoming Penn. Law Review), and “The Creation of the Department of Justice,” (Stanford Law Review 2014). The second book project is “The Rise of the Prosecutor Politicians: Race, War, and Mass Incarceration,” focusing on California Governor Earl Warren, his presidential running mate Thomas Dewey, the Kennedys, World War II and the Cold War, the war on crime, the growth of prosecutorial power, and its emergence as a stepping stone to electoral power for ambitious politicians in the mid-twentieth century.
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