AC Constitution Day speaker, Whittington, to reflect on freedom of thought
Posted Monday, September 12, 2022
Author: Mickey Alvarado
Keith E. Whittington, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, will deliver Adrian College’s Constitution Day address, titled “Freedom of Thought and the Struggle to End Slavery,” in Knight Auditorium at 12 p.m., on September 19. The event is free and open to the public.
Whittington is the chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. He has been a Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow, John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow, a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, and a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law, Harvard Law School, and Georgetown University Law Center. He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
“Professor Whittington is one of the leading constitutional scholars in the country,” said Nathan Goetting, Adrian College’s Romney Institute Director and Professor of Criminal Justice and Jurisprudence. “As a leader of the Academic Freedom Alliance, a non-partisan organization of academics committed to protecting fearless, independent thought for all on college campuses, he’s been in the news quite often lately. I’m confident his address will inspire us to think of the Constitution in new, challenging ways. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.”
Whittington is a co-editor of the “New Essays on American Constitutional History,” and the “Cambridge Studies on the American Constitution.” He is currently completing “Constitutional Crises, Real and Imagined,” and “The Idea of Democracy in America, from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age.”
He is the author of multiple publications, including “Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present,” which won the Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize, and “Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech,” which won the PROSE Award for best book in education and the Heterodox Academy Award for Exceptional Scholarship, as well as “Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning,” and “Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review,” and “Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History,” which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and courts and the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history, and “Judicial Review and Constitutional Politics,” and “American Political Thought: Readings and Materials.”
Whittington is a co-editor of “Congress and the Constitution,” “The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics” and of “Law and Politics: Critical Concepts in Political Science.”
He is also the co-author of “American Constitutionalism, vol. 1: Structures of Government” and “American Constitutionalism, vol. 2: Rights and Liberties,” which together won the Teaching and Mentoring Award for innovative instructional materials in law and courts, and “American Constitutionalism: Powers, Rights and Liberties.” He has been published widely on American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, the law and politics of impeachment, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech.
Whittington’s work for a general audience has appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and can be found on Twitter at @kewhittington. Whittington is the host of The Academic Freedom Podcast.
