This year’s Constitution Day Debate at 91鶹Ʒ will feature Jonathan Turley, the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of public interest law at George Washington University, and Michael Klarman, the Charles Warren Professor of legal history at Harvard Law School, debating “Is There a Constitutional Crisis? How Would We Know?”
The annual debate will take place from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18, in 91鶹Ʒ Memorial Chapel, sponsored by the Robert P. Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions with support from the Office of the President, the Dean of the Faculty, and University Events. The debate will be moderated by Stephen P. Garvey ’87, A. Robert Noll Professor of law at Cornell Law School.
“What does or should it mean to say that a ‘constitutional crisis’ exists? Have we ever been in one? Are we in one now? These are the questions on the table,” says Garvey.
91鶹Ʒ celebrates Constitution Day each year by bringing to campus seasoned experts in their fields to debate topics facing the nation and encourage informed discourse among students. Since 2005, 91鶹Ʒ has hosted a debate on campus focused on a variety of constitutional issues, including the constitutionality of the administrative state, abortion, affirmative action in college admissions, NSA surveillance, and free speech vs. hate speech. In 2024, 91鶹Ʒ’s Constitution Day Debate focused on academic freedom on campus with Keith Whittington of Yale Law School, author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, and Ulrich Baer of New York University, author of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus.
Jonathan Turley: Professor Jonathan Turley is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law. He has written over three dozen academic articles that have appeared in a variety of leading law journals at Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and other schools. He is the author of the best-selling and award-winning book The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage (Simon & Schuster, 2024). After a stint at Tulane Law School, Professor Turley joined the George Washington faculty in 1990 and, in 1998, was given the prestigious Shapiro Chair for public interest law, the youngest chaired professor in the school’s history. In addition to his extensive publications, Turley has served as counsel in some of the most notable cases in the last two decades, including the representation of whistleblowers, military personnel, former cabinet members, judges, members of Congress, and a wide range of other clients. He is also one of the few attorneys to successfully challenge both a federal and a state law.
Turley has worked for various networks and newspapers for over three decades. He is currently the legal analyst for Fox News. He has previously worked as a legal analyst for NBC, CBS, and the BBC. He is also a columnist for USA Today, The Hill, and other national newspapers. Turley’s columns on legal and policy issues appear regularly in national publications with hundreds of articles in such newspapers as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Turley received his BA at the University of Chicago and his JD at Northwestern. In 2008, he was given an honorary doctorate of law from John Marshall Law School for his contributions to civil liberties and the public interest.
Michael Klarman: Professor Michael J. Klarman is the Charles Warren Professor of legal history at Harvard Law School, where he joined the faculty in 2008. He received his BA and MA (political theory) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, his JD from Stanford Law School in 1983, and his DPhil in legal history from the University of Oxford in 1988. At Oxford, he was a Marshall Scholar. After law school, Klarman clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1983–84). He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987 and served there until 2008 as the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of law and professor of history.
Klarman’s first book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004 and received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History.
He published two books in 2007, also with Oxford University Press: Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement and Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History, which is part of Oxford’s Inalienable Rights series. In 2012, he published From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage. In 2016, Oxford University Press published his comprehensive history of the Founding, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the US Constitution, which was a finalist for both the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award. In 2020, he authored the Harvard Law Review Foreword on “The Degradation of American Democracy — and the Court.” Klarman is currently working on a comprehensive history of race and sports in the United States, from the beginnings of organized sports around the Civil War to the present.
Stephen P. Garvey ’87: Stephen Garvey, A. Robert Noll Professor of law at Cornell Law School, has written and taught in the areas of capital punishment, criminal law, and the philosophy of criminal law. Following his graduation from Yale Law School, Professor Garvey clerked for the Hon. Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then he practiced in the Washington, D.C. firm of Covington & Burling. He joined the Cornell Law School Faculty in 1994. Garvey received his MPhil in politics at Oxford University (University College), Oxford, England, in 1989 and a BA in political science from 91鶹Ʒ in 1987. He is also a member of the Kraynak Institute External Advisory Board.