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By Shelley Lambert, Marguerite McLamb, and Greg Malloy.
Example of the Thesis Development Process
You are in a course entitled “Congressional Oversight of the Executive Branch” and
your paper assignment requires you to develop a thesis statement regarding an aspect of law
related to Congress’ oversight of the Executive Branch. Your audience is an adjunct professor
who has spent the better part of her career developing expertise on the subject while working
on the hill. You’ve only been learning about congressional oversight for two months. Yet,
your thesis must be original, advance a cogent argument, and propose a solution. This can
seem like a daunting task. Where should you begin?
First, pick a topic that interests you and begin conducting background research on that
topic. You are going to be spending many hours researching and writing your seminar paper,
and the writing process will be much more enjoyable if you are passionate about your thesis.
For example, you are a constitutional law enthusiast and you are intrigued by the topic of a
president taking an executive action that conflicts with the rule of law. Therefore, you begin
researching the legal history of presidents who have taken an action that conflicts with their
constitutional duties.
Your background research will undoubtedly produce a voluminous amount of case
law and secondary sources. Thus, your next step is to narrow your topic to a specific case or
constitutional duty. For example, you are particularly interested in Justice Jackson’s three
categories of presidential power in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (a.k.a. “The
Steel Seizure Case”). Therefore, you begin to develop an original thesis statement by
considering how you can apply the analysis from Youngstown, a topic which has already been
repeatedly written about, to the current president’s potentially unconstitutional use of the
presidential pardon power. For example, you decide to apply the Youngstown analysis to
President Trump’s willingness to use his constitutionally prescribed pardon power to pardon
his colleagues in the Russia investigation. It is your contention that such a use of the pardon
power would result in an unconstitutional collision with Congress’ constitutional oversight
powers. You have now narrowed down your thesis to a manageable problem that you find
interesting. You are almost ready to finish developing your thesis. The final step is to propose
a solution to your problem. Your final thesis may look something like this:
This paper argues that the President’s pardon power may only be exercised for the
purpose of serving the public welfare, and therefore, if a President were to exercise the
pardon power purely for the self-serving purpose of protecting himself from impeachment,
the Supreme Court would be entitled to invalidate the pardon as an unconstitutional
infringement on Congress’s investigative and impeachment powers.