The Constitution Drafting Project challenged three teams of leading constitutional thinkers from different ideological perspectives to draft their ideal constitutions. Earlier this week, “team progressive”—led by Caroline Fredrickson of Georgetown Law along with Jamal Greene of Columbia Law and Melissa Murray of NYU Law, and “team libertarian”—led by Ilya Shapiro along with Tim Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute and Christina Mulligan of Brooklyn Law—joined Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen to present their constitutions. They explained their writing and drafting process, how they decided whether to start from scratch or revise the existing Constitution, what they kept and what they changed, how the two constitutions are similar and different, and more.
Read the libertarian and progressive constitutions here and stay tuned for a constitution from “team conservative,” coming soon.
The Constitution Drafting Project was generously supported by Jeff Yass.
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Team Libertarian
- Ilya Shapiro is the director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Shapiro is the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court, co‐author of Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution, and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Shapiro has testified before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 300 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court.
- Christina Mulligan is vice dean and professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. While at Brooklyn, Mulligan researched as a visiting scholar at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and taught as a visiting associate professor at Yale Law School. Previously, she taught at the University of Georgia and was a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in law at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her scholarship has been published in a variety of journals and law reviews, including Georgia Law Review, SMU Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary.
- Timothy Sandefur is vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute where he holds the Clarence J. & Katherine P. Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. He is the author of six books—The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski, Frederick Douglass: Self‐Made Man, Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st Century America, The Permission Society, The Conscience of The Constitution, The Right to Earn A Living: Economic Freedom And The Law—as well as some dozens of scholarly articles. His articles have appeared in Reason, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard.
Team Progressive
- Caroline Fredrickson is a Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown Law. She previously served as the president of the American Constitution Society from 2009-2019. Fredrickson has published works on many legal and constitutional issues and is a frequent guest on television and radio. In addition, she regularly contributes opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other news outlets. She is also the author of Under The Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over, The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections, and most recently, The AOC Way.
- Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law and faculty director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network at New York University School of Law. Her publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. She is an author of Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice and has translated her scholarly writing for more popular audiences by publishing in the New York Times, Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vanity Fair, and the Huffington Post.
- Jamal Greene is the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing American Apart and numerous law review articles, including Rights as Trumps?, Rule Originalism, and The Anticanon. During the 2018–2019 academic year, Greene served as senior visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He currently serves as co-chair of the Oversight Board, an independent body set up to review content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, New York Daily News, and The Los Angeles Times.
Moderator
- 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.
This episode was engineered by Greg Scheckler and produced by Jackie McDermott, Lana Ulrich, and Tanaya Tauber.
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