Webcast: Professor Jack Rakove's Constitution class

"Time for a Ticklish Experiment?"

In Federalist 49, James Madison reminded his readers that the whole business of constitution-making was inherently difficult. Such "experiments are of too ticklish a nature to be unnecessarily multiplied," he warned. But with our Republic seemingly locked in a perpetual political impasse, and a Supreme Court that translates its own political preferences into divided constitutional judgments, has a time come when Americans should consider the idea of constitutional change? Professor Rakove uses the final lecture of his course to speculate on this idea.

Jack Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American studies, professor of political science and, by courtesy, of law. He has taught at Stanford University since 1980. Professor Rakove’s research revolves around the era of the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1997. His book, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. Professor Rakove has contributed chapters to numerous scholarly collections, and written essays for various law reviews, including the Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities.

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Stay tuned. The series of six videos that chronicle Professor Jack Rakove's class, "The Constitution: A Brief History" will be available on the Stanford Humanities Center website later this spring.