Does America have a Constitutional Crisis? What roles do lawyers, judges, and the Supreme Court play in maintaining Constitutional democracy?
Fordham Law School will explore these questions in the new audio podcast series “Constitutional Crisis Hotline,” hosted by Professors Jed Shugerman and Julie Suk. With threats to constitutional democracy at home and abroad surfacing almost daily, Shugerman and Suk will debate these pressing issues. In each episode, legal experts will join the hosts to break down key Supreme Court decisions, analyze the latest developments in public law and policy, and discuss breaking legal news.
“We’ve grown up thinking that it’s there to structure our democracy, but what if the threats to democracy are coming from the Constitution that we have that was written in 1787 by people who just couldn’t imagine the future we’re in now?” Suk asked in the podcast trailer.
Our trailer is up!
Follow Constitutional Crisis Hotline with @JulieCSuk & @jedshug, sponsored @FordhamLawNYC:
Breaking legal news about democracies breaking…
and what we can do to fix them.https://t.co/azjkYyWfoy— ConstitutionalCrisisHotline (@CnCrisisHotline) October 7, 2022
“Perhaps the answer might be to stick to that Constitution with more faithfulness to the founders’ purposes and visions, but maybe to add new judges to make sure that we’re actually being faithful to democracy and the Constitution,” Shugerman, Suk’s co-host, retorted.
Episode 1, “Constitutionalism: What can we say now?”, available now on Spotify, Audible, Google Podcasts, and all Simplecast platforms, begins with the Supreme Court’s crisis of legitimacy following its recent decisions on abortion and gun laws, among others. With guests Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. centennial chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School and Samuel Moyn, chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, Shugerman and Suk confront the big questions raised by their students: Should the Constitution be scrapped? Can we live without constitutionalism?
Episode 2, “Women Lawyers to the Rescue,” which features New York Times best-selling author Dahlia Lithwick, will be available on Oct. 17.
Tune into “Constitutional Crisis Hotline” on Spotify, Audible, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and all Simplecast platforms. Episodes will be available bi-weekly.
Meet the Hosts
Jed Shugerman received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. (History) from Yale. His book, The People’s Courts (Harvard, 2012), traces the rise of judicial elections, judicial review, and the influence of money and parties in American courts. It is based on his dissertation that won the 2009 American Society for Legal History’s Cromwell Prize. He is co-author of amicus briefs on the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases. He is currently working on two books on the history of executive power and prosecution in America.
Julie Suk is an interdisciplinary and comparative legal scholar, researching equality at the intersection of law, history, sociology, and politics in the United States and globally. She has authored dozens of articles and book chapters about comparative constitutional law; the procedural implementation of equality norms in the United States and Europe; gender quotas; and women, work, and family. Her 2020 book, We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, was the first book to chronicle and assess the twenty-first-century revival of the Equal Rights Amendment, culminating in Virginia’s ratification in 2020. Her next book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It, on women’s struggles towards inclusive constitutional democracy around the world, will be published in spring 2023.