The Constitutional Accountability Center is pleased to announce that it has selected Professor Alexis Hoag-Fordjour of Brooklyn Law School as its inaugural Scholar-in-Residence. Beginning on July 1, 2024, Hoag-Fordjour will work independently for one year on scholarship surfacing the historical context of Reconstruction to provide a clarifying framework for interpreting rights in the present. She will also participate in the life of CAC’s ongoing work in litigation, communications, and collaboration with progressive movement partners. At Brooklyn Law, Professor Hoag-Fordjour serves as a Dean ..read more

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that “Officers of the United States” who engaged in insurrection against the country are disqualified from holding office. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2023, “Was Trump ‘an Officer of the United States’?,” Michael Mukasey argues this provision does not apply to Donald Trump—because, he says, presidents are not “Officers of the United States.” This argument contradicts the plain text of Section 3, defeats the Amendment’s evident purpose, and belies common sense. Section 3 was adopted principally to prevent “Officers of the ..read more

I was drawn to the Constitutional Accountability Center by CAC’s refusal to cede constitutional text, history, and values to conservatives.  After joining the team as a Douglas T. Kendall Fellow, I’ve been honored to work alongside colleagues dedicated to expanding and defending our democracy, protecting individual rights, and ensuring that our government remains able to protect workers, consumers, and the environment.  It’s difficult to imagine a better place to have spent the last year. To put it lightly, this is not the easiest time for progressive litigation.  During its pre ..read more

As I look back on my time at the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the invaluable learning experiences and opportunities for growth. In my role as Senior Research Associate, I assisted an incredible team of attorneys in crafting appellate and Supreme Court briefs. During this time, I had the privilege to work on some of the most significant cases brought before the Court, witnessing both landmark victories and disappointing losses. It is the wins that continue to inspire my passion for legal advocacy. One such moment of triumph was the recent rulin ..read more

The Supreme Court is ailing, but you wouldn’t know it from Chief Justice Roberts’s 2022 year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary.  Rather than grapple with the plummeting loss of public confidence in the institution in the aftermath of a term that saw the Court decimate fundamental rights and equality, Roberts used the occasion to tell the story of the fearless district court judge who risked his life and well-being to desegregate the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.  What Roberts willfully ignored, of course, is that th ..read more

This Term, the Supreme Court is considering Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, an important environmental case in which individuals are challenging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s effort to enforce the Clean Water Act (CWA), a law designed “to restore and maintain the . . . integrity of the Nation’s waters.” The decision in this case could have significant ramifications not only for the preservation of waterways in the United States, but also for Congress’s power to address national problems that require national solutions. CAC filed in this case in support of the EPA—mark ..read more

Today is January 6th, the anniversary of one of the darkest days in our democracy’s history—a day when violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol building to stop Congress from affirming the nation’s 2020 election results. But today it is important not simply to look back at what happened then; we must also look forward to ensure that our democracy and the peaceful transition of power is never disrupted again. Chief among these efforts has been the work of the January 6th Select Committee, which issued its Final Report last month. The Report is the culmination of nearly two years of me ..read more

Last week, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a breathtaking decision that, if allowed to stand, would impair the ability of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to carry out its important work combatting financial exploitation.  According to the Fifth Circuit, the fact that the Bureau is not funded by periodic appropriations from Congress violates the Constitution.  The court therefore vacated the Bureau’s Payday Lending Rule, which was adopted to prevent lenders from collecting payments from borrowers’ bank accounts in ways that lead to exce ..read more

The new Supreme Court term begins today, and this new, deeply conservative Court may be about to squelch the Constitution’s promise of true racial equality. In the first month of the Court’s new term, the high Court is hearing Merrill v. Milligan, a challenge to racially gerrymandered maps enacted by the Alabama legislature in 2021, and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina, frontal assaults on race-conscious college admissions policies adopted to ensure a truly diverse student body and pathways to leadership to qualified individuals of every race and ethnici ..read more

Ask a random person on the street how many people make up a jury and you are all but certain to hear the answer “twelve.” Going back some eight hundred years, leading English and American jurists would have answered the same. But in 1970, in a case called Williams v. Florida, the Supreme Court departed from this multi-century consensus to hold that juries as small as six people are constitutionally permissible under the Sixth Amendment. Yesterday, during the Supreme Court’s annual long conference, one of the many cases it considered whether to hear was a case called Khorrami v. Arizona that wo ..read more