The National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project brought together three teams of leading constitutional scholars—team libertarian, team progressive, and team conservative—to draft and present their ideal constitutions. The leaders of each team—Caroline Fredrickson of team progressive, Ilya Shapiro of team libertarian, and Ilan Wurman of team conservative—joined host Jeffrey Rosen to share the process behind their approach to drafting their constitutions and agreeing on what to include and not to include; the overall structure of their constitutions as well as the specific constitutional ideas they added to and subtracted from the U.S. Constitution; and the similarities and differences between the three constitutions.
Team libertarian also included Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute and Christina Mulligan of Brooklyn Law School.
Team progressive also included Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School and Melissa Murray of New York University School of Law.
Team conservative also included Robert P. George of Princeton University, Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, and Colleen A. Sheehan of Arizona State University.
The project was generously supported by Jeff Yass.
FULL PODCAST
TRANSCRIPT: Download the transcript here.
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
PARTICIPANTS
Ilya Shapiro is director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and author of the book Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court. He is the leader of team of Team Libertarian (which also includes Timothy Sandefur, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute and author of The Conscience of the Constitution, and Christina Mulligan, vice dean and professor of law at Brooklyn Law School).
Caroline Fredrickson is Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown Law Center, Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of The Democracy Fix, Under the Bus, and The AOC Way: The Secrets of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Success. She is the leader of Team Progressive (which includes Jamal Green, the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and author of the forthcoming How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart, and Melissa Murray, the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU School of Law).
Ilan Wurman is Associate Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University. He is the leader of Team Conservative (which includes Robert P. Georg, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University; Michael W. McConnell is Richard & Frances Mallery Professor, Stanford Law School; Director, Stanford Constitutional Law Center; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Formerly Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; and Colleen A. Sheehan, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, Arizona State University.)
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
This episode was engineered by Kevin Kilbourne and Greg Scheckler, and produced by Jackie McDermott. Research was provided by Lana Ulrich, Nicholas Mosvick, and Tom Donnelly.
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