Reconstructing and Deconstructing the Constitution: A Conversation with Scholar and Author Aziz Rana
The second webinar discusses structural tensions with the Constitution, our cultural relationship with this document, and the importance of including diverse voices for interpreting and improving it.
Streamed live on February 5, 2025
Speakers:
Barrett Holmes Pitner – Philosopher, Journalist, Educator; Author, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America
Aziz Rana – J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government at Boston College Law School; Author, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them
Moderator: Etienne Toussaint – Associate Professor of Law, University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law
This conversation explored how the U.S. Constitution’s structural flaws perpetuate inequality and undermine democracy. The system’s design, including the Electoral College, unrepresentative Senate, and rigid amendment process, enables minority rule while making meaningful reform nearly impossible. These built-in limitations create a paradox where the Constitution both fails to deliver on its democratic promises and shields those in power from accountability. During Reconstruction, this cycle was broken when it was realized that legal rights alone were insufficient. Continuing Reconstruction requires moving beyond reverence for the document itself to focus on building the collective power necessary to reshape governance.
Highlights:
Credal constitutionalism → the idealized view of the Constitution as fulfilling universal equality masks its anti-democratic features and origins in compromise on issues like slavery
The current crisis of President Trump’s executive overreach reflects both violations of constitutional principles and the system’s incentives for lawlessness
Reconstruction was an attempt to build a multiracial democracy, but its erasure during Jim Crow and periods of Regression, perpetuated a cycle where theoretical ideals overshadow experiential justice
Democracy requires “freedom with” (collective flourishing) over “freedom from” (individual detachment)
Originalism, as a judicial doctrine, reinforces a static, exclusionary vision of the Constitution, ignoring Reconstruction’s expansive view through the introduction of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments