Article V: Amendments

Panel Recap – Roundtable: About the Constitution in 2020

Adam Chandler

Bringing together four of Yale Law School’s constitutional heavyweights, last Friday’s roundtable discussion was both backward- and forward-looking. Moderated by Duke’s Neil Siegel, the panelists spoke about the Constitution in 2020 as a movement, where it came from and what it aspires to achieve. After Reva Siegel introduced the Constitution in 2020 project, Robert Post spoke on democratic constitutionalism, Jack Balkin examined the purposes of a constitutional theory, Bruce Ackerman highlighted a constitutional concern for economic justice, and all the professors debated the future of the Supreme Court and its appointment process.

 Video courtesy of Yale Law School.

 

Reva Siegel recounted how this "Constitution in 2020" endeavor was instigated in response to a conservative project called the Constitution in 2000. The Constitution in 2000 was a document produced within the Reagan Justice Department in 1988 setting forth favored and disfavored lines of constitutional decisions. The document was a blueprint for change, imagining how a more conservative constitutional terrain could be achieved through judicial appointments and constitutional litigation. It was utopian, but restorative. It was also highly successful. Now it has spawned a responsive vision, the Constitution in 2020 project, which includes conferences, a book, and this blog.

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Posted on October 19, 2009 @ 11:51 am

Panel Recap: Localism and Democracy

Daniel Winik

At the inception of the American Constitution Society, just eight years ago, this panel might well have been viewed as an anomaly. Federalism was the watchword of conservatives struggling to constrain the power of the national government. How times have changed. As Ernie Young noted in his pre-conference blog post, "During the Bush years, progressives trained since the 1960's to disparage state autonomy as indelibly tainted by racism rediscovered the importance of state policy diversity. They defended California's right to go its own way on environmental policy and Massachusetts' prerogatives to allow gay marriage at home and protest human rights violations abroad." The result has been a flourishing progressive federalism movement—or more accurately, as several panelists noted, a federalism without political valence. The four panelists last Saturday spoke to divergent features of today's federalism. What united their presentations was a sense of the dynamism and possibility of the new federalist movement.

Video courtesy of Yale Law School.

 

First to present were Ilya Somin and Ernie Young, who brought opposite perspectives to the question of how diminishing loyalties to particular states have altered the course of federalism. Somin argued that lower barriers to inter-state mobility promote federalism by facilitating "voting with your feet," even as the rise of federal funding reduces states' incentives to attract tax revenues. Young argued, to the contrary, that a resurgence of state loyalties is needed to foster rich cultures of federalist innovation within the states.

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Posted on October 11, 2009 @ 1:57 pm

The Constitution in 2020 is a companion website to The Constitution in 2020 (Oxford University Press 2009).  Here you will find ten sample chapters from the book, essays about the future of the U.S. Constitution, discussions of current constitutional issues, a bibliography and resources for further study.