Law scholar Aziz Rana will give the 2025 Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture, “The Constitution in crisis: how Americans came to idolize a document that fails them,” Sept. 8, 12-1 p.m. in 106 White Hall. The event is hosted by the American Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences.
A professor of law at Boston College, Rana will discuss the relationship between the constitutional system and current democratic backsliding, including basic civil liberties. The lecture will explore the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. Constitution, highlighting its role in current legal crises as well as the costs of what he calls “our still pervasive culture of constitutional veneration.” Before joining Boston College, he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.
At Boston College Law School, Rana’s research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development – in particular how shifting notions of race, citizenship and empire – have shaped legal and political identity since the United States’ founding.
Rana said that he explores a dual role played by our constitutional order: freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
“On the one hand, the document offers a key language for confronting violations of such essential safeguards. But on the other hand, its electoral and legal arrangements increasingly seem to place these very safeguards in peril,” he said. “Coming to grips with this bind is vitally important to the present.”
Rana’s 2024 book, “The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them,” details the ideas of constitutional veneration he will introduce in the lecture. The book explores the modern emergence of the phenomenon in the 20th century, especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority, and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics. His 2010 book, “The Two Faces of American Freedom,” 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.
Rana’s writing has appeared in n+1, Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times and in many other publications.
Read the story in the Cornell Chronicle.
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