In The Independent Review, Ilya Somin reviews (courteously but skeptically) The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America by Frank Buckley. From the introduction:
Frank Buckley is a Canadian-born academic who has long been a leading legal scholar in the United States. Despite (or perhaps because of) living in America for many years, he has not lost his affection for queen and parliament. In The Once and Future King, he offers a penetrating analysis of the dangerous growth of executive power in three predominantly English-speaking democracies: Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Executives in all three nations have increased their authority at the expense of the legislature in recent decades. But Buckley contends that Britain and Canada’s parliamentary regimes are better able to limit the dangers of executive aggrandizement than America’s separation-of-powers system.
Buckley’s book has many strengths and undoubtedly qualifies as a major contribution to the debate over comparative constitutional design. On some key issues, however, he overrates the benefits of parliamentary systems and undervalues those of presidentialism.
(Update: Link missing before, now fixed. Apologies).
Posted at 6:51 AM