lecture: Making American Constitutional Consensus // Aziz Rana

3CT's inaugural Theorizing the Present lecture for 2014-2015 will be presented by Prof. Aziz Rana (Assoc. Prof. of Law), Cornell.  Introduction by Jennifer Pitts (Political Science)

In contemporary American politics, the Constitution enjoys widespread public support. But this has not always been the case in national history. In fact, the  dominance and substantive meaning of constitutional veneration is a relatively recent development -- the product of a series of interconnected political struggles between the American emergence onto the global stage with the Spanish-American War and World War I and the fallout of student and civil rights protest in the 1970s. This talk will explore how the Constitution rose above dissent and what the implications have been for public life.