Prof. Heidi Kitrosser's New Book Wins Civil Liberties Prize

Professor Heidi Kitrosser's forthcoming book, Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, has been named the recipient of the 2014 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. The book will be published in January by the University of Chicago Press.

Kitrosser has been a professor at the Law School since 2006, teaching and writing in the areas of constitutional law, First Amendment Law, and government secrecy. In Reclaiming Accountability, she explores the tension between Americans' desire for transparency in government and the need for secrecy in matters of national security—two imperatives that are generally considered antithetical. Kitrosser contends that this is not the case, and that our concern ought to lie not with secrecy per se but with the sort of unchecked secrecy that can result from "presidentialism," or constitutional arguments for broad executive control of information. Taking readers through the key presidentialist assertions—including "supremacy" and "unitary executive theory"—she explains how they misread the Constitution in a way that is profoundly at odds with democratic principles.

Commenting on the book, Georgetown University law professor David Cole said, "Secrecy breeds power, and power demands secrecy. Kitrosser shows how this dynamic has changed the American presidency and threatened our democracy. She provides a nuanced and compelling diagnosis of the problem secrecy creates and concrete proposals for how to get accountability back." Columbia Law School professor Peter L. Strauss said, "Those of us concerned with the steady and apparently irresistible growth of presidential administration will find in Kitrosser's brilliant book a thoughtful response to the overstatements of the constitutional arguments claiming to support it and a careful exposition of counterarguments that could help to curb it."

The IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize was established in 2007 by Chicago-Kent alumnus Roy C. Palmer and his wife, Susan M. Palmer, to honor an exemplary work of scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society.