Join law professors Bernadette Meyler of Stanford University, Alison LaCroix of the University of Chicago Law School and co-editor of the new book, Cannons and Codes: Law, Literature, and America's Wars, and political scientist Catherine Zuckert of the University of Notre Dame and Arizona State University, for a discussion exploring the ways American literature—including the works of Daniel Defoe, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and others—has intersected with the Constitution and American democracy from the nation’s founding, to the Civil War, and beyond. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
Participants
Bernadette Meyler is the Carl and Sheila Spaeth Professor of Law, Professor, by courtesy, English, and Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life at Stanford University. She is also a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies. Meyler is the author of Theaters of Pardoning, and the co-editor of two volumes on law and literature: New Directions in Law and Literature and The Oxford Handbook of Law and the Humanities.
Alison LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law, Associate Member of the Department of History at the University of Chicago. She is the co-editor of several volumes on law and literature, including the new volume, Canons and Codes: Law, Literature, and America's Wars. LaCroix also serves on the editorial advisory board of the American Journal of Legal History, and was recently appointed to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.
Catherine Zuckert is Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and a visiting professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. She is the author of Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form, and has written on politics and literature for journals such as The Journal of Politics and PS: Political Science and Politics.
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
- Alison LaCroix, "The Lawyer’s Library in the Early American Republic," in Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel
- Alison LaCroix, Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life, “The Founders’ Fiction”
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Skipwith (1771)
- Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
- Bernadette Meyler, Cornell Faculty Publications, “Daniel Defoe and the Written Constitution"
- Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
- Daniel Defoe, The General History of the Pyrates
- Catherine Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form
- British Library, "Jane Austen"
- William Writ, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry
- Bernadette Meyler, Southern California Law Review, “Between the States and the Signers: The Politics of the Declaration of Independence Before the Civil War”
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
- Tracy Smith, "Declaration," in Wade in the Water
- Sacvan Bernovich, The American Jeremiad
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Catherine Zuckert, The Claremont Review of Books, “Huckleberry Finn at 100: A review of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain”
- James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, or, The Sources of the Susquehanna
- James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
- Mark Twain, North American Review, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
- National Constitution Center, Interactive Constitution, "Shakespeare and the Making of America"
- Suzan Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor
- Wikipedia, "Walter Jackson Bate"
- Wikipedia, "Maria Edgeworth"
- Wikipedia, "Frances Burney"
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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