In this episode, Julie and Jed talk with Sanford Levinson and Samuel Moyn about modern challenges to constitutionalism in the U.S. and abroad.
On this first episode of Constitutional Crisis Hotline, we start off with the big question: should the U.S. Constitution be scrapped?
Guest bios
Sanford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals. His books include Constitutional Faith (1988); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012) and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today(September 2017). Sandy recently led a group of law professors and political scientists to write a new constitution for the United States, published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Additional background:
Read about Jed’s take in Slate in 2019 on “Are We in a Constitutional Crisis?”