Walter Berns

Walter Berns is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor emeritus at Georgetown University, specializing in political philosophy and constitutional law.

Walter Berns interpreted wrote on prerogative power and the unitary executive theory based on the theories of John Locke, who wrote, in the Second Treatise on Government, that while the legislature was the first power, "The law cannot "foresee" events, for example, nor can it act with dispatch or with the appropriate subtlety required when dealing with foreign powers. Nor, as we know very well indeed, can a legislative body preserve secrecy." Locke, in the same writing, continued that such events should be left to "the discretion of him who has the executive power." It is in this context that he first spoke of the "prerogative": the "power to act according to discretion, for the public good without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it." He concluded by saying "prerogative is nothing but the power of doing public good without a rule" (italics in the original).