Center for Law & the Economy Workshop: Aziz Rana (Boston College)
"The Constitutional Bind"
J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government
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Center for Law and the Economy Workshop Series
The Murphy Institute's Center for Law and the Economy hosts workshops each semester featuring Tulane and guest faculty from the fields of law, economics, and political science. Presenters share their latest research on a range of topics, including regulation, civil rights, the criminal legal system, and other key issues in law and political economy. Papers are distributed beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.
The workshops, organized by Adam Feibelman, Director of the Center on Law and the Economy and Sumter D. Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, are open to faculty, students, and the Tulane community.
Aziz Rana is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government. His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country. Rana is an editorial board member of Dissent, The Law and Political Economy Blog, Just Security, and The Journal of American Constitutional History. He is also a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
His latest book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics. Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as n+1, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Blog.
