This summer, as a continuation of the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project, teams of leading conservative, libertarian, and progressive scholars convened for a virtual constitutional convention. After debating and deliberating together, they drafted and proposed a series of amendments to the Constitution. In this episode, we share the presentation that the team leaders made on Monday, discussing the five amendments they all agreed upon. Caroline Fredrickson, senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice represented team progressive, Ilan Wurman, associate professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, represented team conservative, and Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, represented team libertarian. Other convention “delegates” included team progressive’s Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School; team libertarian’s Christina Mulligan of Brooklyn Law School and Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute; and team conservative’s Robert George of Princeton University, Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, and Colleen Sheehan of Arizona State University.
This program is presented in conjunction with the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project.
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This episode was produced by John Guerra, Tanaya Tauber, Lana Ulrich, and Melody Rowell. It was engineered by the NCC's A/V team. Research was provided by Sam Desai.
Participants
Caroline Fredrickson is a distinguished visitor from practice at Georgetown law Center and a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Before joining Georgetown, she served as the president of the American Constitution Society. She is the author of several books, including The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections, and most recently The AOC Way.
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. He previously served as executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, as well as a vice president of the Cato Institute, director of Cato's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, and publisher of Cato's journal Supreme Court Review. He is the author or co-author of several books, the latest of which is Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court.
Ilan Wurman is an associate professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He writes primarily on the 14th Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. He is the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment.
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
- National Constitution Center, Constitution Drafting Project
- National Constitution Center, Constitution Drafting Project, "The Proposed Amendments"
- Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court
- Caroline Fredrickson, The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections
- Caroline Fredrickson, The AOC Way: The Secrets of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Success
- Ilan Wurman, The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment
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