Editor's note: This excerpt is from a NYU Law News article

Last September, NYU Law’s Democracy Project posted an essay on its website that went viral. Authored by Caleb Nelson, a University of Virginia School of Law professor and leading originalist scholar, the essay expressed skepticism about whether there are strong originalist grounds supporting the unitary executive branch theory. It was an issue central to the then-pending and much-watched case Trump v. Slaughter, as well as other cases on the reach of presidential authority.

William Baude of the University of Chicago Law School, another prominent originalist, called Nelson’s piece a “bombshell” on social media. On the day the New York Times wrote about it, the essay garnered 114,000 views. It was cited in briefs filed by both parties in Slaughter, as well as in nine amicus briefs on both sides. It was also mentioned during oral argument.

Nelson’s piece provided an early proof of concept for the Democracy Project, launched last September to pursue research and convene bipartisan conversations on democratic governance. Its founding faculty directors are Bob Bauer, professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence; Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law; and Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law. Two other democracy-related initiatives debuted at the Law School last fall: the Center for Law and Public Trust, headed by Distinguished Scholar in Residence Vanita Gupta ’01 following her service as associate attorney general of the United States from 2021 to 2024, and the Rule of Law Lab, directed by Professor of Practice Amrit Singh. While each of these initiatives has a different focus, they originated from a common concern: Around the world, through much of this century, democracy and the rule of law have been taking a drubbing.

The annual Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, which grades 167 countries on the state of their democracies, ticked up slightly this year. But the average country’s score on the previous year’s edition fell to its lowest level since the index began in 2006. (The rating is based on an assessment of a nation’s electoral processes, governance, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.) Nonprofit Freedom House reports that its metrics for global freedom have fallen for the 20th consecutive year. Statistics published in 2026 by another nonprofit, World Justice Project, show that “rule of law has declined globally for the 8th year in a row.”

A big source of downward pressure on democracy health assessments: the United States. The US dropped on the latest Democracy Index, which categorizes the country as a “flawed democracy.” While still considered “free” by Freedom House, the US has lost more points on the Freedom House index since 2005 than all other countries measured except for Nauru and Bulgaria. “We live in an era of deep democratic dissatisfaction,” says Pildes. “Over the last 10 to 15 years, large numbers of citizens in nearly all Western countries have been expressing discontent, distrust, alienation, anger, and worse, no matter which parties or coalitions are in power.” American democracy, he adds, “is facing challenges unlike any it’s faced since possibly the 1890s,” a previous period of extreme polarization.

“Democracy and the rule of law form the bedrock for almost everything that’s taught and studied in law schools—and for how we function as an orderly and equitable society,” notes Dean and Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law Troy McKenzie ’00. “The cracks forming in those foundations deserve urgent attention, and these initiatives are part of the way NYU Law is stepping up to meet the moment.”

Democracy’s Roundtable

Certain aspects of democracy have long been a focus at law schools—separation of powers, federalism, and voting rights, for example. But democracy itself was not a dedicated field of teaching and scholarship until 1998, when Issacharoff, Pildes, and Pamela Karlan (now at Stanford Law School) published the first edition of their casebook, The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process.

While the first edition pointed to forces creating “pressure” on democracy in the US, such as racial redistricting and the role of money in politics, the overall tone was optimistic. Internationally, more new democracies have been formed in the last decade than at any previous time,” the authors wrote. The tone of the most recent edition of the casebook, published in 2022, shifted markedly, with the publisher’s web page noting “the embattled state of democracy in the US and abroad.”

Across borders, observes Issacharoff in an interview, democracies are being undercut by similar factors, including weakened political parties and paralyzed legislative branches. “When it happens everywhere, it can’t just be a bug of American society,” he says. “It has to be something more systemic.” And that, he says, led to the decision to create the Democracy Project and its core objective: “to step back and think more systemically [about these common challenges] and to invite others to do that with us.”

On its website, the Democracy Project bills itself as “democracy’s roundtable,” and during its first year it has published more than 140 essays featuring a broad range of perspectives on the state of democracy in the US and abroad, as well as potential reforms. Examples include pieces on congressional control over federal spending by Shalanda Young, director of the US Office of Management and Budget under President Joe Biden and now a distinguished scholar in residence and adjunct professor at NYU Law; on technology and democracy by entrepreneur Mark Cuban; and on the importance of “solidarity” in commitment to the rule of law by Adam Bodnar, a senator and former minister of justice in Poland.

From its inception, the Democracy Project has shaped public debate, as demonstrated by Caleb Nelson’s essay. (The Supreme Court did not adopt Nelson’s view, ruling in June in Slaughter to expand presidential authority over independent agencies.) Another essay, published last October by Jonathan Mitchell, questioned the idea that the Supreme Court alone can interpret the Constitution and that the legislative and executive branches are not free to reach their own determinations of constitutional meaning when performing their official functions. Mitchell is a conservative former solicitor general of Texas and architect of Texas’s pre-viability abortion ban. But the day after his piece was published, Samuel Moyn, a liberal professor at Yale Law School, posted his one-word assessment on X: “Good.”

“There are very few forums these days—academic forums in particular—that bring together people of significantly different views,” notes Pildes. “That’s one of the important things we wanted to do, and I think we’ve actually succeeded in doing, maybe even more so than we hoped.”

Read the full piece here.