On this first episode of Constitutional Crisis Hotline, we start off with the big question: should the U.S. Constitution be scrapped?

Guest bios

Sanford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals. His books include Constitutional Faith (1988); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012) and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution:  The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today(September 2017). Sandy recently led a group of law professors and political scientists to write a new constitution for the United States, published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

• Read Sandy’s Introduction to the Democracy Constitution

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

• Read Sam’s op-ed in The New York Times, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed”

Additional background:

• Listen to Julie’s Constitution Day 2022 remarks on “Does the United States Need A New Constitution?” at Knox College to commemorate the 1858 debate between Lincoln and Douglas in the same location. 

Read about Jed’s take in Slate in 2019 on  “Are We in a Constitutional Crisis?”