The Levitt Center invites students to apply to this Spring ‘27 Justice Lab “Constitutional Moments: Creating, Sustaining, and Changing How We Govern with Professors Frank Anechiarico, Ty Seidule, Heather Sullivan, and Benj Widiss.
As the United States enters its second 250 years with the oldest codified constitution in the world, is it time for another constitutional moment? Trust in the federal government sits at or near historic lows, and confidence in the electoral process itself has slipped alongside it. Meanwhile, a movement most people have never heard of is quietly approaching a constitutional threshold: twenty states have already passed applications for an Article V Convention of the States. Whether or not you think the constitutional order is in crisis, more people are asking foundational questions about it than at any point in a generation; Who gets to write the rules? Who gets to change them? And what happens when the answers stop feeling legitimate to the people governed by them?
This Justice Lab will give students the tools to think rigorously about those questions – not as abstractions, but as lived, contested, and repeatedly re-imagined processes, approached through historical, legal, comparative, and aesthetic lenses. Students will step into the shoes of the original framers to write the Constitution, then reconvene as a hypothetical Convention of the States to amend it. They will analyze constitutional law through landmark court cases and the doctrines that underpin them. They will study how other countries in the Americas have handled constitutional rupture and refounding. And they will trace how the founding moment itself has never stopped being rewritten, from the founding documents as rhetorical performances through two centuries of American fiction, poetry, and film that reclaim, contest, and re-stage it. Students will leave with a working command of constitutional design, argument, and interpretation: how constitutions get made, how they break, and how they get imaginatively remade.
Experiential learning for this Justice Lab will include two long form role playing games in COLEG/GOVT/HIST281. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 focuses on the most fundamental political and legal event in American history. Students in the game, playing the actual delegates to the Convention, gather in “Philadelphia” to write a new constitution for the United States. The second game creates a hypothetical “Convention of the States” to add amendments to the Constitution. Students will also have a required evening event in mid-April.
Required Courses:
GOVT-273W / PPOL-273W: Revolution and Re-Foundings in Latin America with Heather Sullivan (M/W 1:00 - 2:15PM)
Nearly all Latin American countries gained independence in the 1800s, but unlike in the United States, many of their constitutions from this period have been swept away. Revolutions and large-scale constitutional reforms occurred throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. Some of these constitutional reforms were seen as a way to address profound socioeconomic and racial inequalities in the region. Others have been a tool for concentrating executive power. Some were motivated by both currents. This class will explore the causes and effects of these constitutional re-foundings as well as the processes through which they occurred. This is a writing-intensive course.
COLEG-281 / GOVT-281 / HIST-281: Common Ground: A Laboratory for Civil Discourse with Ty Seidule (T/Th 10:30 - 11:45 AM)
From the beginning of the American experiment, political leaders and citizens have struggled over how to create a democracy, how to sustain it, how to operate it fairly, and even how to discuss it. Discourse has always been contested – and not always civilly. The course consists primarily of two complex roleplaying games to help us understand how America created its constitution and how we might change it. The first game, The Constitutional Convention of 1787: Constructing the American Republic places students in the actual roles of the founding fathers in Philadelphia. The next game is “Convention of the States: Toward a More Perfect Union?” In this scenario, the states have exercised Article V of the US Constitution, calling all the states together “for proposing Amendments.” Can we change the Constitution? We’ll try. This is a speaking intensive course.
GOV241: Survey of Constitutional Law with Frank Anechiarico (T/Th 1:00 - 2:15PM)
In this course, students will analyze constitutional doctrines through major cases. We will examine the function of the Supreme Court as an instrument of government and arbiter of public policy as well as core doctrines including judicial review, federalism, interstate commerce, due process and questions of individual rights.
Prerequisites for this course are waived for Justice Lab participants
LIT2XX: Reconstituting the Constitution with Benjamin Widiss (M/W 2:30 - 3:45PM)
This course explores the Constitutional “Moment” as an extended sociocultural formation in the decades just before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, and as a recurring American phenomenon thereafter. We will begin by analyzing the founding documents as rhetorical performances, reading the aspirations and anxieties they express in relation to those legible in contemporaneous literary texts. Then we’ll turn to political, literary, and cinematic works across subsequent American generations that reclaim or figuratively re-stage the founding moment even as they radically re-frame its stakes and stakeholders. Likely authors: A. Hamilton, T. Jefferson, W. Irving, H.D. Thoreau, F. Douglass, E.C. Stanton, W. Whitman, A. Lincoln, G. Stein, R. Ellison, G. Lucas, L.M. Miranda.
Enrollment in the program is limited to 16 and participating students must enroll in all four courses.
Please fill out the following application form. Upon clicking "Apply Now", you will be prompted to create a free account with Interfolio. If you already have an Interfolio account, you should sign in. If you don't already have an Interfolio account, click on the "Sign up" button (NOT the "sign in through partner institution link). Applications are due October 28th
