The Court’s Decisive Hand Shapes the Executive’s Foreign Affairs Policymaking Power

Kimberley L. Fletcher

A dynamic institutional relationship exists between the United States executive branch and the United States Supreme Court. This Article examines how the Court affects constitutional and political development by taking a leading role in interpreting presidential decisionmaking in the area of foreign affairs since 1936. Examining key cases and controversies in foreign policymaking, primarily in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this Article highlights the patterns of intercurrences and the mutual construction process that take place at the juncture of legal and political time. In so doing, it is more than evident that the Court not only sanctions the claims made by executives of unilateral decisionmaking, but also takes a leading role in (re)defining the very scope and breadth of executive foreign policymaking.