Recent legal, political, and academic developments have drawn increased attention to the relationship between separation of powers and federalism in the constitutional structure.  For example, questions such as how federal courts should interpret legal texts, whether federal courts should enforce structural limits on congressional power, what place customary international law holds in the federal system, and whether other forms of non-conventional federal law are legitimate each implicate principles of both separation of powers and federalism.  In an article entitled Separation of Powers as a Safeguard of Federalism, Professor Bradford Clark explores the relationship between the lawmaking procedures that the Constitution specifies for various forms of federal law and the federalist structure that the Constitution envisions.  Specifically, he argues federal lawmaking procedures not only are integral parts of the constitutional design for the separation of powers, but preserve federalism both by making federal law more difficult to adopt, and by assigning lawmaking power solely to actors subject to the political safeguards of federalism.  This conference brings together some of the nation’s top constitutional scholars to discuss the implications of this thesis for a variety of questions.  In so doing, it provides a unique opportunity for addressing the normative bases of fundamental (and competing) structural constitutional theories.