The Justice Dialogues
Amendments: Public Freedom in the Age of Constitutional Assault
Date: September 21, 2023Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: Library, 3rd Floor, Grand Reading Room
(Click on the image to view the flyer)
The Justice Dialogues
Thursday, 21 September 2023
Grand Reading Room, 3rd Floor.
Cal Poly Pomona Library
Amendments
Public Freedom in the Age of Constitutional Assault
It is not often that a sitting US President describes the Supreme Court of the United States as “not a normal court.” Words like “assault” and “attack,” which were not until long ago used primarily to define extra-judicial intrusions of individual states into the realm of civil rights, have now come to define actions taken by highest court of the land to describe its extra-constitutional verdicts and overturning of precedents.
When did the Constitution—and the final interpreter of its word and spirit, the Supreme Court of the United States—transform from being a judicial and moral arbiter of our civic conflicts to itself becoming a partisan actor in our political strife? How do we make sense of the modern constitutional tradition in an age when even the normative—or imaginary—line between politics and jurisprudence has ceased to hold? Is it time to rethink the democratic right to amendments in the constitution, granted by the constitution?
On the occasion of Constitution Day this September, join The Justice Dialogues at Ahimsa Center for a panel that will examine the changing forms of our constitutional compact and its contemporary challenges, posed by new liberal democratic realities.
Panelists
Itzel A. Garcia, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, CPP
Jeffrey Helmreich, Associate Professor and Co-Director, Center for Legal Philosophy, UC-Irvine
Aishwary Kumar, Shri Shantinath Endowed Chair and Director, Ahimsa Center, CPP
Co-sponsored by California Center for Ethics and Policy and Bronco Advocacy League.
Part of our 2023-24 The Faces of Freedom series.
Itzel A. Garcia
Itzel A. Garcia is a Philosophy Professor at Cal Poly Pomona, who recently joined the department.
Jeffrey Helmreich
Jeffrey Helmreich is an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the humanities and law minor, Jeffrey Helmreich works in ethics and legal philosophy, specifically moral psychology, speech acts, moral and legal remedy, and the philosophy of torts and evidence. He is also co-director of the Center for Legal Philosophy.
Aishwary Kumar
Aishwary Kumar is an intellectual historian and political theorist who works on the relationship between human freedom, constitutional theory, and political violence. He specializes in Moral Philosophy and questions in Political Thought and Law. Kumar holds the Shri Shantinath Endowed Chair in Ahimsa Studies and is the Director of the Ahimsa Center at CPP. He is the author of Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, 2015).