Panel Recap - Getting There from Here

The capstone of the conference, Sunday’s “Getting There From Here” panel, sought to take theoretical insights gleaned over the weekend and suggest how they might be put into practice. If most panels called for keener eyes and longer, or deeper, vision, the final panel called for tougher hands. It featured: Tom Saenz, President and General Counsel, Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Debo Adegbile, Associate Director of Litigation, NAACP; Bob Gordon, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, Yale Law School; Marvin Ammori, Free Press/ University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law; and Nan Aron, President, Alliance for Justice. Pam Karlan, Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, Stanford Law School, deftly shepherded the diverse group. Given that these practice-minded panelists had the last word, however, they were able not just to look forward to the future but back at the weekend’s proceedings.

It was particularly fruitful to have a group of practitioners and practically-minded theorists act as commentators on a weekend’s worth of constitutional action. Prof. Karlan began the panel by announcing, that unlike all the foregoing panels, the presenters would not actually make any presentations, but would instead immediately enter discussion, goaded on by Karlan’s incisive questions. Furthermore, following an intra-panel discussion, the floor would open for questions, but only from students in attendance. In 2020, those questioners will likely by leaders and panelists in their own right. Better start now, Karlan seemed suggest.

These two late alterations in the format exemplified the possibilities of progressive or liberal practice. One of the great challenges for liberal leaders, whether within or without the academy, is to lead in a manner that does not perpetuate the kinds of asymmetries and hierarchies so familiar to leader-led dynamics. Karlan’s announcements acknowledged this challenge. A panel dedicated to embodying a progressive vision in the living constitutional order needed to look and act progressive.

Video courtesy of Yale Law School

Having set the stage for a sharp conversation, Karlan continued in a critical vein. She first asked the panelists to talk about what they thought had been missing from the conference. Most of the answers had a sort of “meat-and-potatoes” vibe, one that would continue through the rest of the panel. Debo Adegbile and Tom Saenz drew attention to two areas of great inequality that they felt had been ignored at the peril of more general progressive goals: educational inequality and immigration policy respectively.  Adegbile argued that a lack of decent educational opportunities could create a voiceless generation. Making a distinction between immigrant rights (protecting those who are already here) and immigration policy, Tom Saenz insisted that we need to incorporate constitutional values into our immigration policy, which still effectively discriminates against non-Europeans and often, in the form of certain guest worker programs, separates families.

Panel Recap – Roundtable: About the Constitution in 2020

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.

Progressive Constitutional Theory

 

Does an active and progressive national government require liberal constitutional theorists to articulate and then advocate a comprehensively liberal theory of constitutional law?  “No” seemed to be the answer offered by the Constitutional Theory panel at the recent Constitution 2020 conference at the Yale Law School.

 Video courtesy of Yale Law School.

 

For the budding constitutional theorists among us, Jamal Green’s opening comments provide a word of caution.  Since the role of constitutional theorists “is actually quite narrow,” Green claimed that progressives should not worry too much about trying to convince judges to adopt liberal modes of constitutional interpretation.  Contrary to popular belief, Green suggested that originalism, the right’s preferred model of constitutional interpretation, has not actually accomplished as much as its proponents or opponents think.  Rather, it has simply served as a handy rhetorical device the right has used to buttress the work that is done in the political sphere.  Since the left does not have anything as rhetorically useful, progressives should focus primarily on creating a progressive constitutional discourse from which liberal jurists can draw as opportunities arise.