At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with youth civic scholars from the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University and the Quill Project, which works to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world's foundational legal texts. A core goal of the Quill Project, founded in 2016, is making the discussions that led to the creation of great legal documents of our time more accessible to students, and underscoring that what unites these documents is the way that they are written not by a single person but by a collective.
We had a fascinating and far ranging conversation about what a constitution is and means—for real. It’s more important to know, understand, and ground ourselves in the Constitution, at both the federal and state level, than many realize. While in general The U.S. Constitution isn’t seen as a tangible thing that people can relate to, because it feels too removed from people’s lives and too immovable, constitutions are actually much more living documents than we acknowledge. Guest Grace Mallon, incoming Kinder Junior Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute of the University of Oxford, grew up in England and was captivated by the US Constitution when she read about it in her history class–so much so that she continued on to do doctoral work about internal inconsistencies between the Constitution and history. Utah Valley Students Joseph Stanley and Antony Jacksonhave focused their academic work on state constitutions and now we understand why. While many of us didn’t even realize that states HAD constitutions, we came to see how states can provide rights for their constituents beyond what the federal constitution does in some very exciting ways, which underscores the importance of local and state government as we always talk about. Thank you for listening!
