Professor

Julian

Davis

Mortenson

Julian Davis Mortenson is a legal historian, constitutional litigator, and award-winning teacher who specializes in the constitutional and political history of early America. His current book project—“The Founders’ President” (under contract with HUP)— develops a new paradigm for understanding presidential power at the American founding. It shows that the eighteenth-century presidency functioned, not as the amorphous locus of unspecified sovereign rights, but as the rule-bounded instrument of a statutory agenda over which the president himself had enormous influence. 

Mortenson has held visiting appointments on the faculties of Cambridge University, KU Leuven, and the University of Tokyo. His new textbook on constitutional law has been widely adopted and is already slated for a second edition. Mortenson’s litigation work includes his service as lead counsel in a case that required Michigan to recognize the marriages of more than 300 same-sex couples; as lead appellate counsel for the Arab-American Civil Rights League’s challenge to the Muslim ban; as advocate for discharged military service members challenging the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” law; and as a principal drafter of the merits briefs in the landmark habeas corpus case of Boumediene v. Bush.