At Wright State, on September 17th, I'll give a short talk touching upon key themes in three books: (1) Constitutional Disobedience, Louis Michael Seidman; (2) Framed, Sandy Levinson,and (3) The Flexible Constitution, Sean Wilson.

The American Constitution is neither old nor unwise. It's central problem lies only in the way that a certain generation of law school professors are starting to imagine it. The document wasn't considered "old" when Ronald Dworkin was king of the American legal mind. And it isn't the last 15 to 20 years of age that has finally hampered the parchment; it's the fact that American law professors have been having a very poor conversation for nearly two decades. The latent cause of all of this is the rise of originalism. Only if originalism wins does the Constitution become "too old." And one wonders if scholars like Louis Seidman and Sandy Levinson aren't silently rooting for conservative professors to forever bury the life of the Constitution into the dirt of history. For doing this would take away the inherently dynamic and flexible nature of the open-ended and undefined provisions. It would, in a manner of speaking, take away the constitutional imagination -- and in so doing, make Americans falsely think they are stuck with a document that is "old."

Where and When: http://www.wright.edu/events/constitution-day-0