Louis Fisher: Government and the Academy Mitchel A. Sollenberger, University of Michigan, Dearborn ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... A dozen years before this PS symposium, several political scientists came together in a similar manner to honor Louis Fisher’s scholarship and highlight his contributions to the discipline (Spitzer 2000). Many wonderful insights and observations were made to shed light on Fisher’s versatility and impact. However, that effort missed an opportunity to highlight a key contribution of Fisher’s work: a revival of pre- behavioral era functions and concerns within political sci- ence. In many ways Fisher is a throwback to a traditional political science approach where scholars did not select sub- fields or specialties but sought to engage in broad public debates about governing and, most importantly, believed that normative and empirical studies could and should go hand in hand. With the latter approach Fisher has made his most important contribution to political science. Unlike the public law scholar Edward S. Corwin (1929) Fisher has made only limited attempts to directly engage in a debate over the meaning or nature of political science (2009). Certainly he has urged a return to the study and use of law in political science (2007, xi), but he has not waged any battles over methodology as so many others have done in recent decades.Yet, one cannot help but see in Fisher’s work the rejec- tion of a pure positivist view of the discipline where research is focused primarily on the use of quantitative data to test theories that are divorced from any normative assessment. Fisher has also done much to counter the view that public law and political science should be walled off from each other. He once remarked that “[s]tudying the presidency without reference to legal boundaries and values is to treat the United States as any other country, including those that are authori- tarian and fascist” (Fisher 2009, 813). As a result, his work takes seriously the need to study government by interweaving law and politics in scholarly analyses. Fisher’s promotion of the public law approach in political science has not been without challenges. His career took off when the behaviorist movement had come to dominate polit- ical science. At that time the field began to fracture as behav- iorists focused not only on value-free analysis but started to neglect important traditional areas of political science such as political theory and public law. In fact, one of the most famous and well-regarded presidential scholars is the late Richard Neustadt. His book Presidential Power, still read today in many graduate programs, failed to even reference the Constitution (1960). In addition, Fisher never has held a full-time faculty position in a PhD-granting political science department, which has meant he has not had the same opportunities to train and develop students in his own image like so many other politi- cal scientists. 1 Nevertheless, Fisher’s books and articles have been assigned readings in various undergraduate and gradu- ate courses ranging from presidency seminars to constitu- tional law capstones (Fisher 2004, Fisher 2011a). Consequently he has functioned as an important counterweight to the pop- ular dismissal of the public law approach, a development chronicled and explained in greater detail in Robert Spitzer’s contribution to this symposium. AN OVERVIEW OF LOUIS FISHER’S SCHOLARSHIP To understand Fisher’s relationship, impact on, and struggles with the political science discipline we must outline his work. Fisher came of age when the country and academia were in the midst of a love affair with the presidency. Almost no one questioned Neustadt when he wrote: “What is good for the country is good for the President, and vice versa” (1960, 185). Neustadt was not alone. Writing in 1965, James MacGregor Burns argued, the “stronger we make the Presidency, the more we strengthen democratic procedures and can hope to realize liberal democratic goals” (330). Two years later, Grant McCon- nell explained: “To ask what is to become of the presidency is to ask what is to become of the entire American political order” (1967, 87). Fisher recognized that those scholars were developing a theory of the presidency with few or no limits. Such a view of how government functioned did not even conform to the ide- alized visions of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s or John F. Kennedy’s administrations that many academics had in mind when writ- ing about the presidency, let alone what the Constitution or the practical experience of governing over 150 years provided to that point. As a result, Fisher’s scholarship begins with a basic premise that the Constitution’s source of legitimacy and authority is the people and that government should function in ways to uphold its commitment to democratic principles (Fisher 2010a, vi; Fisher 2011b, 3, 21). Far from stopping there, Fisher points out that the framers created a governing system of “separated powers” to prevent centralized authority from threatening liberty and to “pre- serve republican government” (Devins and Fisher 2004, 77). But Fisher rejects a simplistic view of the separate branches of government working in isolation and only coming together to battle one another (Fisher 2007, 6). Instead, he explains that the framers did not construct a government solely to restrain power, but to also have the capacity to govern itself effectively (Fisher 2007, 6–11). This meant providing for “a separate and independent executive” particularly after the framers’ experi- ences under the Articles of Confederation (Fisher 2007, 8; see also, Fisher 1972, 1–27, 241–70). ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... SYMPOSIUM ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 488 PS • July 2013 © American Political Science Association, 2013 doi:10.1017/S1049096513000759