Thursday, March 1, 2018 from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. students, staff and members of the community attended the Bowers Writers House for an evening of reading and discussion with Brian Kalt, author of the novel “The Constitutional Cliffhangers.”

In Kalt’s book “Constitutional Cliffhangers: A Legal Guide for Presidents and Their Enemies,” the author envisions six such controversies.

Examples of these controversies are the criminal prosecution of a sitting president, a two-term president’s attempt to stay in power, the ousting of an allegedly disabled president and more.

Kalt is an American professor of law. He teaches administrative law, and his research focuses on structural constitutional law and juries.

Kalt, who received a B.A. from the University of Michigan, earned his juris doctor from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

After law school, he served as a law clerk for the Honorable Danny J. Boggs, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

He has occasionally written op-eds for national newspapers and is the author of “Constitutional Cliffhangers: A Legal Guide for Presidents and their Enemies” and “Sixties Sandstorm: The Fight over Establishment of a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 1961-1970.”

The United States Constitution’s provisions for selecting, replacing, and punishing presidents contain serious weaknesses that could lead to constitutional controversies, according to Kalt.

With today’s American political culture in a truly volatile state, the event intrigued many to attend.

Director of the Bowers Writers House Jesse Waters opened up the event by first raffling off some books, one which was the novel by Kalt, before he turned the stand to the guest speaker.

Kalt started the discussion by telling the audience how his book came to be and giving the audience a bit of his background and what he learned over the years.

He compiled articles that he wrote into his book that would argue one side and then he stated the fictional side.

He then read two chapters from his book. Chapter four was entitled “The Line of Succession Controversy” and looked at the line of power from the president and vice president to the Speaker of the House and so on.

He read the introduction to the chapter, and people listening could see the different sides on the topic.

He did the some reading of Chapter three of looking at articles three and four of the 25th amendment and at the removal of the power from the president or the vice president, which is voluntary. The removal of the president with a disability which this involuntarily.

After the reading, Kalt opened the floor to the audience members to engage in conversation and ask questions. This was followed by a book signing.

“I really enjoy talking about my book, it is something that I am passionate about since I was in law school,” Kalt said. “My hope for the book is that the collection of articles are a way to push for something to be done to fix these problems and to prevent bad things from happening.”

Kalt also described how his book came to be.

“Articles have to be backed up, but this book gives me more freedom to write, but it does include endnotes so that the information is still from reliable sources,” he said. “The articles that are included in the book are some from scratch and the other ones are cited from other sources.”

Several audience members were part of a constitutional law class, taught by assistant dean of academic achievement and engagement, director of the honors program and pre-law program and associate professor of political science Dr. Kyle Kopko.

He told them about the event, and the event sparked their interest to attend as it pertained to their class.

Sophomore Paige Oustrich gave her opinion about what she thought of the event.

“I thought it was very fascinating. It was very topical on political situations going on like president pardon and prosecution,” Oustrich said.

“I liked how he did not just take one political standpoint, but explored both sides that can be made to argue,” first-year and Etownian staff writer Meghan Kenney said.

The next Bowers House event is “Managing and Making the Nice: Entrepreneurship and Dynamism of Industry with Julie Hassett.” The event will take place Wednesday, March 21 from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.