American Constitution

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course covers the making of the American Constitution, the institutions and systems of government which it established, and its long turbulent history over the past two centuries. However, the primary focus of the course is upon the difficulties faced in recent decades by modern Americans in reconciling the aspirations of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century social, cultural and political aspirations with institutional forms which were - to a large extent - set in aspic over two hundred years ago. The course examines the interplay of eighteenth-century and twentieth-and twenty-first century concerns and the controversies which have arisen out of the encounter - in the Supreme Court especially - of America's eighteenth-century constitutional inheritance with modern social and political realities.