Notre Dame - Constitutional Studies Lectures

The keynote lecture of the Notre Dame Graduate Conference in Political Theory and Constitutional Studies featured Yale University Professor Dr. Bryan Garsten to Notre Dame. Dr. Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science and the Humanities, and Chair of the Humanities Program at Yale University. He is the author of "Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment" (Harvard University Press, 2006) as well as articles on political rhetoric and deliberation, the meaning of representative government, the relationship of politics and religion, and the place of emotions in political life. Dr. Garsten is now finishing a book called "The Heart of a Heartless World" that examines the ethical, political and religious core of early nineteenth century liberalism in the United States and France. Learn more about the CCCG: constudies.nd.edu/ *** The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the University of Notre Dame, the College of Arts and Letters, or the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. Recorded May 3, 2024 at the University of Notre Dame

John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Professor Yoo has served in all three branches of government. He was an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism issues after the 9/11 attacks. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He has been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and federal appeals Judge Laurence Silberman. His talk discusses the legal controversies surrounding former President Donald Trump, focusing specifically on his actions leading up to and following January 6, 2021. This discussion transcends personal opinions of Trump and examines the broader implications for the U.S. legal and political landscape. Visit the CCCG: constudies.nd.edu/ *** The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the University of Notre Dame, the College of Arts and Letters, or the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. Recorded April 19, 2024 at the University of Notre Dame

Teresa M. Bejan is Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. Professor Bejan writes about political theory and history, bringing past perspectives to bear on contemporary questions. She has written extensively on themes of free speech, civility, tolerance and equality in historical contexts ranging from ancient Athens to 20th-century analytic political philosophy.

Public lecture titled: "How to Protect Free Speech from Big Tech", by Philip Hamburger, Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. Presented by the Notre Dame Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government on Thursday, March 24, 2022 at the University of Notre Dame. More information at constudies.nd.edu

We kick off the Spring 2022 semester with a panel discussion on the future of American politics after Dobbs v. Jackson, "What Happens if Roe is (Not) Overturned?". Featuring former Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-IL), Prof. Sherif Girgis (ND Law School), and Prof. Christina Wolbrecht (ND Political Science), conversation will focus on the potential political and legal outcomes of one of the Supreme Court's most controversial cases of this term. Vivek Ramaswamy is a New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur who has founded multiple successful enterprises. A first-generation American, he is the founder and Executive Chairman of Roivant Sciences, a new type of biopharmaceutical company focused on the application of technology to drug development. He founded Roivant in 2014 and led the largest biotech IPOs of 2015 and 2016, eventually culminating in successful clinical trials in multiple disease areas that led to FDA-approved products. Mr. Ramaswamy was born and raised in southwest Ohio. He graduated summa cum laude in biology from Harvard in 2007 and began his career as a biotech investor at a prominent hedge fund. Mr. Ramaswamy continued to work as an investor while earning his law degree at Yale, where he was a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. He was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development. In 2020 he emerged as a prominent national commentator on stakeholder capitalism, free speech, and woke culture. He has authored numerous articles and op-eds, which have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Newsweek, and Harvard Business Review. Mr. Ramaswamy serves on the board of directors of the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

Join us for a lecture by Vivek Ramaswamy on his new bestselling book, "Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam." Vivek Ramaswamy is a New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur who has founded multiple successful enterprises. A first-generation American, he is the founder and Executive Chairman of Roivant Sciences, a new type of biopharmaceutical company focused on the application of technology to drug development. He founded Roivant in 2014 and led the largest biotech IPOs of 2015 and 2016, eventually culminating in successful clinical trials in multiple disease areas that led to FDA-approved products. Mr. Ramaswamy was born and raised in southwest Ohio. He graduated summa cum laude in biology from Harvard in 2007 and began his career as a biotech investor at a prominent hedge fund. Mr. Ramaswamy continued to work as an investor while earning his law degree at Yale, where he was a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. He was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development. In 2020 he emerged as a prominent national commentator on stakeholder capitalism, free speech, and woke culture. He has authored numerous articles and op-eds, which have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Newsweek, and Harvard Business Review. Mr. Ramaswamy serves on the board of directors of the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

"Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics" Book Panel featuring authors David E. Campbell, Notre Dame; and Geoffrey C. Layman, Notre Dame. Panelists include: Scott Appleby, Notre Dame; Eileen M. Hunt, Notre Dame; and Andrew R. Lewis, University of Cincinnati. Presented by: The Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government and the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy on August 27, 2021 at the University of Notre Dame. con studies.nd.edu

"Islam, Freedom, & Natural Law" by Mustafa Akyol of the Cato Institute. Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. Since 2013, he has also been a frequent opinion writer for the New York Times, covering politics and religion in the Muslim world. Presented by the Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government at Notre Dame, the Ansari Institute and World Religions World Church Program in the Notre Dame Theology Department on September 29, 2021. constudies.nd.edu

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the 2021 Tocqueville Lecture on September 16, 2021 at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at Notre Dame. Presented by the Notre Dame Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. More information about the lecture can be found at constudies.nd.edu. About Justice Thomas Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, was born in the Pinpoint community near Savannah, Georgia on June 23, 1948. He attended Conception Seminary from 1967-1968 and received an A.B., cum laude, from College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1974. He was admitted to law practice in Missouri in 1974, and served as an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri, 1974-1977; an attorney with the Monsanto Company, 1977-1979; and Legislative Assistant to Senator John Danforth, 1979-1981. From 1981-1982 he served as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education, and as Chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1982-1990. From 1990-1991, he served as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. President Bush nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and he took his seat October 23, 1991. He married Virginia Lamp on May 30, 1987 and has one child, Jamal Adeen by a previous marriage.

Private lecture delivered by Prof. John Yoo (University of California Berkeley School of Law) to Prof. Phillip Muñoz's Constitutional Law Class on April 13, 2021. Prof. Yoo discussed the history and development of executive power and the Constitution, and shared stories from his time in Washington, D.C. on 9/11. John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His tenth book, Defender-in-Chief: Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, was published last year by St. Martin’s Press. Professor Yoo’s other books include Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War, Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare, and Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George Bush. Professor Yoo has served in all three branches of government. He was an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism issues after the 9/11 attacks. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He has been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and federal appeals Judge Laurence Silberman. Professor Yoo graduated from Yale Law School and summa cum laude from Harvard College. At Berkeley, Professor Yoo directs the Public Law and Policy program and the Korea Law Center and is a winner of the Federalist Society’s Paul Bator award.

Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. A former Dean of Yale Law School, Professor Kronman teaches in the areas of contracts, bankruptcy, jurisprudence, social theory, and professional responsibility. Among his books are Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press, 2007), and his latest book, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan (Yale University Press, 2016). Presented by the Constitutional Studies Program and the Program of Liberal Studies, both at the University of Notre Dame.

Asma Uddin is author of When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America's Fight for Religious Freedom and the forthcoming The Politics of Vulnerability: How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America. She is an Inclusive America Project Fellow at the Aspen Institute, where she is leading a project on Muslim-Christian polarization in the U.S. Ms. Uddin was formerly legal counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and has held academic fellowships at Georgetown, UCLA, and Brigham Young University Law School. She is also an expert advisor on religious freedom to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Presented by the Constitutional Studies Program and Tocqueville Program on April 13, 2021

Jeremy D. Bailey holds a dual appointment in Political Science and the Honors College at the University of Houston. His research interests include executive power, constitutionalism, and American political thought and development. His recent publications include: The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History (University Press of Kansas, 2019), and James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Virtual debate hosted on April 1, 2021 by the Constitutional Studies Program between Jesse Wegman, New York Times, and Trent England, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Jesse Wegman is a member of the New York Times editorial board, where he has written about the Supreme Court and legal affairs since 2013. His recent book is Let the People Pick the President: the Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (St. Martin’s Press, 2020). Trent England is the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. He is also the founder and executive director of Save Our States, which educates Americans about the importance of the Electoral College. Trent is a producer of the feature-length documentary “Safeguard: An Electoral College Story.” Presented by the Constitutional Studies Program and The Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier.

James E. Fleming is The Honorable Paul J. Liacos Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. He writes on constitutional law and constitutional theory and is the author or co-author of five books, including: Fidelity to Our Imperfect Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2015), Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (Harvard University Press, 2013), and American Constitutional Interpretation (4th ed., Foundation Press, 2008) (with Walter F. Murphy and Stephen Macedo of Princeton University and Sotirios A. Barber). Recorded March 9, 2021 Presented by the Constitutional Studies program at the University of Notre Dame.

Check out our latest event, a panel on "The Second Trump Impeachment" with Benjamin Kleinerman (Baylor University), Jeffrey Tulis (University of Texas at Austin), and John Yoo (University of California at Berkeley). Panel recorded on February 3, 2021. Presented by the Constitutional Studies program at the University of Notre Dame and The Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier. About the Panelists: Benjamin A. Kleinerman is a Professor of Political Science at Baylor University where he teaches classes on political thought and political institutions. He also is on the Board of Directors of the Jack Miller Center. Kleinerman is the author of The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power. Jeffrey Tulis is Professor of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book (co-authored with Nicole Mellow) is Legacies of Losing in American Politics (Chicago, 2018). Tulis authored The Rhetorical Presidency in 1987, considered the preeminent scholarship on the evolution of presidential rhetoric. John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His most recent book is Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, published July 2020.

Please join us for a discussion with Sohrab Ahmari, New York Post, and Yuval Levin, American Enterprise Institute. "Rethinking Conservatism After Trump" was recorded on Jan 26, 2021. Sohrab Ahmari is the op-ed editor of the New York Post, a columnist for First Things, and a contributing editor of the Catholic Herald. Previously, he served as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London, and as senior writer at Commentary. His next book, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, will be published in May by Convergent/Random House. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. The founding and current editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review. His most recent book is: A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books, 2020). Presented by the Constitutional Studies program at the University of Notre Dame. For more information, contact jsmith70@nd.edu | 574.631.5351

On Jan 19, 2021, This virtual discussion was hosted by Notre Dame Constitutional Studies. Karin Agness Lips, Network of enlightened Women (New), and Alexandra DeSanctis '16, National Review. Alexandra DeSanctis '16 is a staff writer for National Review and a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She was previously a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism with the National Review Institute. Karin Lips is the Founder and President of the Network of enlightened Women (NeW), the nation’s premier organization for conservative university women. She is the Editor of She’s Conservative: Stories of Trials and Triumphs on America’s College Campuses and a Senior Fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum. She earned her law degree from the University of Virginia and was a Spring 2016 Resident Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. Presented by the Constitutional Studies program at the University of Notre Dame.

A virtual conversation with Henry Olsen and Ruy Teixeira, prominent pollsters and political commentators on different sides of the aisle, on the 2020 election. Event took place on October 29, 2020. About the speakers: Henry Olsen is a Washington Post columnist focusing on politics, populism, and American conservative thought and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center Olsen began his career as a political consultant at the California firm of Hoffenblum-Mollrich. After three years working for the California Assembly Republican Caucus, he returned to school to become a lawyer. Following law school he clerked for the Honorable Danny J. Boggs on the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and as an associate in the Philadelphia office of Dechert, Price & Rhoads. He then joined the think tank world where he spent the next eighteen years as an executive at a variety of institutions, serving as the President of the Commonwealth Foundation, a Vice President at the Manhattan Institute, and as Vice President and Director, National Research Initiative, at the American Enterprise Institute. He left AEI in 2013 to pursue a career in political analysis and writing at EPPC. During that time his work has appeared in variety of leading publications in America and the United Kingdom. He is the author or co-author of two books, “The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism” and (with Dante J. Scala) “The Four Faces of the Republican Party”. His biennial election predictions have been widely praised for the uncanny accuracy, and he is a frequent guest on television and radio programs. Olsen regularly speaks about American political trends and global populism in the United State, Europe, and Australia. Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at American Progress. He is also co-director of the States of Change: Demographics and Democracy project, a collaboration that brings together the Center for American Progress, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Democracy Fund's Voter Study Group and demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution. The goals of the project are to document and analyze the challenges to democracy posed by the rapid demographic evolution of the United States from the 1970s to the year 2060 and to promote a wide-ranging and bipartisan discussion of America’s demographic future and what it portends for political parties and the policy challenges they—and the country—face. His most recent book is The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. His other books include The Emerging Democratic Majority; America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters; The Disappearing American Voter; and Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics. Teixeira’s book The Emerging Democratic Majority, written with John Judis in 2002, was the most widely discussed political book of that year and generated praise across the political spectrum, from George Will on the right to E.J. Dionne on the left. It was selected as one of the best books of the year by The Economist. Teixeira’s recent writings for American Progress include “America’s Electoral Future: The Coming Generational Transformation” and “The Path to 270 in 2020”. Recent essays include "Can Biden Hold the Democrats Together?" (Wall Street Journal) and "Demography Is Not Destiny" (Persuasion). A complete list of recent publications can be found on his website, The Optimistic Leftist, where he also blogs regularly. Teixeira holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Helen Alvaré is a Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, where she teaches Family Law, Law and Religion, and Property Law. She publishes on matters concerning marriage, parenting, non-marital households, and the First Amendment religion clauses. In addition to her books, and her publications in law reviews and other academic journals, Professor Alvaré publishes regularly in news outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and CNN.com.