An interview with Seth Barrett Tillman, in Ami Magazine: Going Mainstream – How a little-known Orthodox Jewish law professor in Ireland became a prominent legal voice in the Trump era. From the introduction:
When Donald Trump was facing serious legal challenges to his second bid for the presidency, few expected that the novel theories of law professor Seth Barrett Tillman, who lives in Dublin with his wife and four children, would help him fight those battles. Tillman, born in Yonkers, New York, in 1963 and raised in a non-Orthodox Jewish home in the suburbs of Rockland County, followed an unconventional path.
After earning an economics degree from the University of Chicago, becoming observant and working as a commodities trader, he took an even more dramatic turn: enrolling in Harvard Law School in his mid-30s. What followed was a decade of judicial clerkships, law firm experience and relentless scholarly writing—most of it outside the academic mainstream.
In 2011, he accepted a teaching post at Maynooth University in County Kildare, Ireland. While his colleagues focused on Irish and EU law, Tillman doggedly built up a body of work on American constitutional law, developing a controversial interpretation of presidential power and status.
As an associate professor at Maynooth, Tillman wrote extensively on the separation of powers, constitutional originalism and the often-overlooked Emoluments Clauses. He has long advanced a novel interpretation of what it means to be an “officer of the United States” according to the Constitution. For years, his theories were largely ignored—or dismissed outright.
Then came Trump. When the former president was accused of violating the Emoluments Clauses and barred from Colorado’s primary ballot under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, Tillman’s counterintuitive view—that the president isn’t an “officer of the United States” or “officer under the United States” constitutionally speaking—was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight.
His legal arguments, once considered marginal, were now being cited by Trump’s lawyers as well as the judges presiding over his cases. Leading academics began to seriously examine his theories. In a surprising turn, the ideas he had tenaciously promoted over the years helped shape the legal defenses of a (then) former president of the United States.
I recently had the privilege of engaging in a wide-ranging conversation with Professor Tillman about his life, his scholarship, and the journey that brought him into the center of some of the most consequential constitutional issues of our time.
Posted at 12:24 AM