Constitution Day Speaker: Judge Elrod

Join us as Judge Elrod commemorates our constitution with an interactive discussion. Below is a sneak peek:

Happy Constitution Day:  Three Cheers for the Mundane!

What makes our constitution special? Perhaps you are a First Amendment buff, and you came to law school because you have a passion for precious freedoms like the right to express unpopular ideas, or to worship according to one’s convictions. Or perhaps criminal law is your thing, and it is the right to fair process that keeps you going during long nights at the library.

What if I were to tell you that liberty guarantees like these—guarantees which were absent from the original text signed in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787—are worthless without the original Articles? These first sections cover such mundane topics as the limits of the federal judicial power, the procedures for turning a bill into a law, and the qualifications for becoming President. It is these structural provisions, those that compose and balance our government, that, in Justice Scalia’s words, “convert the Bill of Rights from a paper assurance to a living guarantee.”[1]

Additional information for Constitution Day: Library guide: https://stcl.libapps.com/libguides/admin_c.php?g=1070439

[1] [Spoiler Alert: He also famously insisted that the Constitution is “dead! dead! dead!”]