Monday, January 9 at 2:00 pm
Call A Convention To Amend The Constitution
Almost everyone can think of something they would like to change in the U.S. Constitution. Some would like to update it to fit new technologies and evolving social mores. Others think the Supreme Court has illegitimately “updated” it too much already, and would like to restore its original meaning. Either way, it is always tempting to invoke Article V to amend the Constitution — to “fix" it, or “restore" it, or “improve" it. But, on the other hand, there is a substantial risk to tinkering with the Constitution: many amendments seem to have unintended consequences. And calling a convention for proposing amendments is even riskier, because it has never been done before — and it might inadvertently put the entire constitutional structure up for grabs. Is it worth the risk? Should the states call a convention to amend the Constitution?
Presented in partnership with the National Constitution Center
Debaters:
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and founder of Rootstrikers, a network of activists leading the fight against government corruption. As a professor at Stanford Law School, Lessig founded the school's Center for Internet and Society. He has authored numerous books, including Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (2011). Lessig serves on the Boards of Creative Commons, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and on the Advisory Boards of the Sunlight Foundation, the Better Future Project, and Democracy Cafe. In 2014 he launched the Mayday PAC, crowdfunding small-dollar contributions to fund a super PAC big enough to win a majority in Congress in 2016 committed to fundamental reform.
Mark Meckler is one of the nation’s most effective grassroots activists. After he co-founded and was the national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, he founded Citizens for Self-Governance, and Convention of States Action, where he serves as president. These organizations provide education about and grassroots organizing and lobbying for the calling of an Article V Convention of States. Currently, such application has been made by eight states, and the resolution will be pending in at least 30 additional states in 2017. Meckler appears regularly on wide variety of television and radio outlets, including MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and the BBC. He is the coauthor of Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution, and writes regularly for the American Spectator, Daily Caller, Breitbart and SelfGovern.com. He is also an attorney who specializes in internet privacy law.
David Super is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in administrative law, health law, legislation (including the federal budget), local government law, property, and public welfare law. In addition to Georgetown, he has taught law at Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, Howard, Maryland, Penn, Washington & Lee, and Yale and taught public policy at Princeton. Prior to entering the legal academy, he served for several years as the general counsel for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and worked for the National Health Law Program and Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. Before attending Harvard Law School, he was a community organizer. His writing has been published in a number of national media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Baltimore Sun.
Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies and is known for his writing on the American legal system. His books include The Rule of Lawyers, on mass litigation, The Excuse Factory, on lawsuits in the workplace, and most recently Schools for Misrule, on the state of the law schools. His first book, The Litigation Explosion, was one of the most widely discussed general-audience books on law of its time. It led the Washington Post to dub him “intellectual guru of tort reform.” He is the founder and principal writer of what is generally considered the oldest blog on law as well as one of the most popular, Overlawyered.com. Before joining Cato, Olson was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an editor at the magazine Regulation, then edited by future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
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