A Boston College lecture on September 8 examines how Americans' veneration of the U.S. Constitution contributes to democratic backsliding and threatens basic civil liberties. The presentation analyzes the Constitution's strengths and weaknesses, emphasizing how electoral and legal arrangements can place freedoms like speech and press in peril. Research centers on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped American constitutional law and political identity since the founding. The material characterizes a dual constitutional role: providing language and remedies to confront rights violations while embedding structures that can undermine those safeguards. A 2024 book traces the twentieth-century rise of constitutional veneration and its political consequences.
A professor of law at Boston College, Rana will discuss the relationship between the constitutional system and current democratic backsliding, including basic civil liberties. The lecture will explore the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. Constitution, highlighting its role in current legal crises as well as the costs of what he calls "our still pervasive culture of constitutional veneration." Before joining Boston College, he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.
Rana said that he explores a dual role played by our constitutional order: freedom of speech and freedom of the press. "On the one hand, the document offers a key language for confronting violations of such essential safeguards. But on the other hand, its electoral and legal arrangements increasingly seem to place these very safeguards in peril," he said. "Coming to grips with this bind is vitally important to the present."
Rana's 2024 book, "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them," details the ideas of constitutional veneration he will introduce in the lecture. The book explores the modern emergence of the phenomenon in the 20th century, especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority, and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.
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