The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them

Within the last decade, Aziz Rana has emerged as one of the most incisive and provocative constitutional scholars of our time. Drawing on his dual background in political theory and law, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped American legal and political identity since the founding of the country. His breakout first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard, 2014), situated the American experience within the global history of colonialism and examined the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. Now, as the recently appointed J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government at Boston College, Rana continues to drive public conversation on the future of American democracy.

The Clough Center is delighted to welcome Professor Rana, one of our 2024-25 Faculty Affiliates, as our first Clough Distinguished Lecturer of the year. In his lecture, which doubles as a book launch, Professor Rana will address the core themes of his just published work, The Constitutional Bind (Chicago, 2024). How did the veneration of the Constitution become an American habit—and, Rana argues, an ingrained vice–during the 20th Century? And how has it continued to constrain our politics ever since? Please join us for this lecture to engage with a new book that is already being hailed as a major landmark in the field.