Friday, October 25, 2024
12pm to 7pm ET
S020 Belfer Room, CGIS South
The Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School, the Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and the Center for American Political Studies were honored to present a public symposium centered on Professor Aziz Rana’s groundbreaking new book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024). With the United States approaching a pivotal presidential election, the symposium aimed to spark meaningful dialogue about U.S. constitutionalism, its contradictions, and alternative constitutional futures.
The Book
An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world.
Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text’s design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life.
In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.
Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights.
The Agenda
12-1pm | Lunch and Introductory Remarks
1-2:30pm | The Problem of Constitutional Veneration
- Keidrick Roy (Harvard Society of Fellows)
- E.T. Stone (Program on American Studies, Harvard University)
- Robert Tsai (Boston University School of Law)
- Sanjay Jolly (moderator)
Our opening conversation examines the modern emergence of constitutional veneration against the backdrop of growing American global authority. Panelists discuss the contradictions within the American constitutional framework and consider the ways they shape the boundaries of popular politics.
2:30-3pm | Coffee Break
3-4:30pm | Forging Alternative Constitutional Horizons
- Zohra Ahmed (Boston University School of Law)
- Barrett Holmes Pitner (The Sustainable Culture Lab)
- David Pozen (Columbia Law School)
- Brandon Terry (moderator)
This conversation focuses on alternatives to modern constitutional veneration. Panelists address how distinct approaches to constituting national communities, originating from and embodying radically different political forms, can generate new constitutional horizons.
4:30-5pm | Coffee Break
5-6:30pm | Keynote Discussion
- Osita Nwanevu (The New Republic)
- Aziz Rana (Boston College Law School)
The symposium culminates in a discussion between Professor Rana and award-winning journalist Osita Nwanevu. Building on the previous conversations, their dialogue surfaces the book’s central themes and assesses the implications for our constitutional present and futures.
6:30-7pm | Reception
The People
Zohra Ahmed is an associate professor at Boston University School of Law who writes and teaches about the US carceral state and US militarism. She examines how law and political economy shape the distribution of state violence, and studies the social movements that have risen up to challenge criminalization and militarization.
Sanjay Jolly is the executive director of the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School. His research examines how communication technologies shape international political economy and imperial statecraft.
Osita Nwanevu a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian. He has written for The New Yorker, Slate, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and the Columbia Journalism Review. His forthcoming book on American democracy is called The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Penguin Random House, 2025).
Barrett Holmes Pitner is a philosopher, writer, educator, and journalist. He is the Founder and Philosopher-in-Chief of The Sustainable Culture Lab, and his book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America (Counterpoint Press, 2021) was selected by NPR as one of their top books of 2021. He has been a contributing columnist for The Daily Beast, The BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Dot, The Huffington Post, and other publications, and he currently teaches at the George Washington University.
David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He teaches and writes about constitutional law, information law, and nonprofit law, among other topics. Pozen’s body of work includes dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters, as well as the book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College Law School. His work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding. His first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2010), situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion.
Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2024). He works at the intersection of American history, literature, and political thought from the Revolutionary era to the present. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, where his dissertation, “Jefferson’s Map, Douglass’s Territory: The Black Reconstruction of Enlightenment in America, 1773-1865,” won the DeLancey K. Jay Prize.
E.T. Stone is a legal scholar who is currently a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Program on American Studies. In her research, she examines how law structures relationships of material and emotional support in the United States. Her work has been supported by the History and Political Economy Project, the Charles Warren Center for American History, the American Society for Legal History, and the Program on Law and Political Economy at Harvard Law School.
Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. A scholar of African American political thought, Brandon is the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/MIT, 2018).
Robert L. Tsai is a Professor of Law and the Harry Elwood Warren Memorial Scholar at Boston University School of Law, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, presidential leadership, and individual rights. His book, America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Harvard University Press, 2014) chronicles eight historical episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution.
