The Lawfare Podcast: A Real, Live Framer of the Constitution

Matthew Kahn
Saturday, March 17, 2018, 1:30 PM

In 1963, John Feerick became a witness to and a framer of our constitutional history. Within two years of graduating from law school, Feerick had written an influential law review article on presidential disability and succession, joined the ABA’s blue-ribbon commission to create a solution to those problems, and became a confidant and an adviser to the members of Congress who wrote the 25th amendment.

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In 1963, John Feerick became a witness to and a framer of our constitutional history. Within two years of graduating from law school, Feerick had written an influential law review article on presidential disability and succession, joined the ABA’s blue-ribbon commission to create a solution to those problems, and became a confidant and an adviser to the members of Congress who wrote the 25th amendment.

As many in the public wonder about the current president’s fitness, I went up to Fordham Law School, where Feerick is now dean emeritus, for a conversation about the page of the constitution he helped write. We talked about how Dean Feerick got involved in the creation of the 25th amendment, how Congress settled on the scheme the amendment enshrines, where it still has gaps and ambiguity, and how political leadership and the public should understand it in modern times.


Matthew Kahn is a third-year law student at Harvard Law School and a contributor at Lawfare. Prior to law school, he worked for two years as an associate editor of Lawfare and as a junior researcher at the Brookings Institution. He graduated from Georgetown University in 2017.

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