East Lansing, MI 48825-1210
Benjamin A. Kleinerman received his BA in Political Science from Kenyon College and his PhD in Political Science from Michigan State University. A former Visiting Scholar in the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University, Professor Kleinerman has also taught at Oberlin College and the Virginia Military Institute. Currently working on a book on discretionary executive power in the American Constitution to be published by the University Press of Kansas, he has written articles on the subject appearing in Perspectives on Politics and American Political Science Review. He also has a forthcoming piece on Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee to appear in The Review of Politics. Professor Kleinerman’s teaching interests include courses on American institutions, issues in American politics, modern (liberal) political thought, and politics and literature.
Benjamin Kleinerman’s book, The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power is available September 2009 by the University of Kansas Press. In the book, Kleinerman questions what role discretionary executive power should play in a constitutional order, examining its ability to either save or destroy the Constitution. George W. Bush’s use of the war on terror to justify the creation of a unitary executive, acting outside and even against the law, provides the catalyst for the study, which traces the dilemma from Hobbes through Lincoln. The book delineates the tough distinctions that citizens need to make between the necessary exercise of extraordinary powers and the dangerous aggrandizement of unnecessary power.
Professor Kleinerman presented a paper in February 2008, "'In the Name of National Security:' Executive Discretion and Congressional Legislation in the Civil War and World War I," at a conference at Princeton University, "The Limits of Constitutional Democracy"
Professor Kleinerman gave a talk at Kenyon College in October 2007 titled "The Politics of the Constitution."
Benjamin Kleinerman co-authored “’We Should See Certain Things Yet, Let Us Hope and Believe’: Technology, Sex, and Politics in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee” in the Fall issue of the Review of Politics on Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee. The co-author is Bernard J. Dobski, Assistant Professor, Assumption College.
