Episodes
Monday Mar 10, 2014
Leid Stories - 03/10/14
Monday Mar 10, 2014
Monday Mar 10, 2014
The U.S. Constitution: Too Much Deference to It, Not Enough Difference With It
The framers of the U.S. Constitution never meant it to be the unassailable, fix-resistant final word on “the law of the land,” but the basis for vigorous debate, and even open challenges, in pursuit of a more just and democratic society, says our guest, Louis Michael Seidman, professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University.
Too much deference is given to the Constitution and not enough difference taken with it, he says in his recently published On Constitutional Disobedience. Consequently, Americans have been living under a compact that compels them to forfeit what the framers regarded as a most basic right for themselves—the right to question or disobey even “supreme” laws and policies that might pass the test constitutionally but nonetheless are wrong.
Seidman has written several books and scholarly papers on the U.S. Constitution generally challenging “the sheer oddity of making modern decisions based upon an old and archaic text,” as he put it in his current release.