The White House this morning released a long-awaited Open Government Directive that follows up on the president's promise -- memorialized on his first full day of office -- to usher in a new era of transparent, participatory governance.

The Directive, issued over the signature of OMB Director...

In the current political climate, the most dramatic point of President Obama's West Point speech on Afghanistan was neither his commitment of additional forces or the precise timing to begin a drawdown of our troops. It was his determination to apply cost-benefit analysis to our military commitments.

Of...

Last Friday, about 35 of us got together at Ohio State for an informal symposium about the local implications of Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, which was the final report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. As the Commission's...

You could keep yourself quite busy these days reading about and attending conferences on new models for journalism. But the current moment of journalistic ferment is actually part of a larger and more alarming story.

The United States is dramatically underinvesting in the production and circulation of knowledge.

It's a safe bet that President Obama's first words this morning were something akin to, "I won what??" This is, after all, the man who conceded that Arizona State had a point in thinking an honorary degree might be premature. President Obama - whom I admire deeply - has been...

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is Friday morning debuting its final report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.

The report marks the first time in the digital age that an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel has sought to explain what exactly are...

Premature post-mortems for health care reform blame President Obama for not weighing in early and forcefully with a specific plan of his own. This supposedly would have helped galvanize support and showed real leadership. The president allegedly "over-learned" the lessons of the Clinton insurance reform effort.

But what would have...

The week's revelations about Karl Rove's hand in the firing of U.S. attorneys make clear that the time has come to protect U.S. attorneys, by statute, from at-will discharge. Like other quasi-independent law enforcers -- members, for example, of the Federal Trade Commission -- they should be subject to discharge...

An intriguing debate continues whether President Obama's use of signing statements to protest provisions of statutes he is signing into law is either consistent with his promise of restraint in issuing signing statements or vindication of George W. Bush's unprecedented volume of such presidential prose.

Having parsed the nine...

America's legal progressives are wondering how to re-engage the American public more generally in a serious discussion about the role of federal judges in interpreting the Constitution. This was a question much discussed, both formally and informally, at last week's superb annual convention of the American Constitution Society...

In a post last week, I explained the origins of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs in a Democracy and its initiative to address three critical questions:

1. What are the information needs of communities in a democracy?

2. How well are those information needs being...

A national study on the information needs of communities in a democracy needs your help.

In late 2007, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded a grant to the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. to organize the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities...

Arguably, the most important legal document of the last 30 years that hardly anyone in America knows about was Executive Order No. 12,291, the Reagan executive order that created the modern system of White House oversight of federal regulatory policy making. The Order required federal agencies other than the...

When GOP defenders said that the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about sex was not about sex, you pretty much knew it was about sex. When the same folks say that Rush Limbaugh's despicable line -- "We are being told that . . . we have to bend over,...

In a world where political symbols matter, President Barack Obama chose a worthy subject for the first executive order of his new administration.

His first executive order, entitled "Presidential Records," revokes Executive Order 13,233, President George W. Bush's constitutionally lunatic procedure for enabling former Presidents and Vice Presidents...

My last two posts focused on whether a newly inaugurated President Obama can move energetically to displace Bush-era policy without embracing a radical theory of the unitary presidency. Having reviewed the permissible scope and usual process for executive orders in general, I here offer three specific suggestions for shifting...

In any entry last week, I posed the question, how can Barack Obama use whatever authority he has to undo the George W. Bush policy regime as quickly as possible without embracing Bush's obnoxious views of presidential power -- in particular, his theory of the "unitary Presidency?" My first...

With the oath of office and an inaugural address behind him, a newly installed President Barack Obama is going to face an immediate and profound dilemma: how to use his authority to undo the George W. Bush policy regime as quickly as possible without embracing Bush's own obnoxious views of...

If tomorrow's results follow the polls, the United States will have an extraordinary opportunity simultaneously to close the book on what is probably the third worst Administration in history - let's hear it for James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson! - and redefine the shape of American politics for generations.

Of...

Lost in our understandable preoccupation with a host of immediate crises might be the fact that the Obama platform holds out the promise of an unprecedented revitalization of American democracy. If you're inclined to take Senator Obama's advice and vote hopes rather than fears, you ought to go to his...