Professor Aziz Rana will deliver the Constitution Day Lecture, addressing the question: “What is the relationship between the constitutional system and today’s democratic backsliding, including with respect to basic civil liberties?” The talk will explore the strengths and weaknesses of the Constitution, highlighting its role in current legal crises as well as the costs of our still pervasive culture of constitutional veneration.
Professor Rana’s research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. His first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press), 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. His latest book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century — especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority — and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.
A prolific scholar and public intellectual, Professor Rana is the author of numerous articles essays and op-eds for such venues such as The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, the Yale Law Journal Forum, n+1, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Blog.
Dr. Rana received his A.B. from Harvard College summa cum laude and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He also earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the University’s Charles Sumner Prize.
Refreshments will be served, and the event is open to the public.
Sponsored by the Provost’s Office and the Political Science Department through the Francis A. Harrington Public Affairs Fund
