I took part in a recent National Constitution Center panel on “The War Over Constitutional Meaning.” The other participants were Prof. Amanda Shanor (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Prof. Alan Trammell (Washington and Lee), and Prof. Wilfred Codrington, III (Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, serving as moderator). Here is the video:
We covered a lot of ground, ranging from the pros and cons of originalism, to whether the Reconstruction amendments are “underrated” to whether we need fundamental constitutional reform. On the latter issue, I made the case that many of our current problems stem not from inherent flaws in the Constitution but from failure to enforce it more fully.
The panel was part of a larger conference on “Constitutional Meaning in the Shadow of the Articles of Confederation.” Video of the full conference and the full list of participants (including many prominent legal scholars and Rep. Jamin Raskin, himself a former legal scholar) are available here.
