"America Unfinished" Edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles

“A new status quo has taken hold in Washington DC,” writes Jody Freeman, one of the Harvard Law School professors offering up short essays in America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance.

 “The federal government is more partisan and less professional than at any time in the modern era,” continues Freeman.

 “The administrative state on which we rely for the bulk of regulatory governance and protection is also weaker, having lost substantial expertise and capacity. The current administration has pushed longstanding legal boundaries and violated deep-rooted governance norms to exert unprecedented political control over the federal bureaucracy, prioritizing loyalty over competence,” she noted.

“For the moment, the Supreme Court has largely allowed these monumental changes to the administrative apparatus to proceed. The federal government, as we have known it for decades, has thus been substantially transformed in ways that may be difficult if not impossible to reverse. At least for now, many agencies charged by Congress with protecting the public interest are less objective, less competent, less expert, and less legally constrained than at any time in recent memory,” noted Freeman.

 That’s just a sample of the many views included in a collection edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles, both professors at Harvard Law School, themselves.

Among the issues tackled are the Supreme Court, power of the presidency, voting rights, criminal law, corporate law, technology, and democracy itself.

 “Sometimes a moment in history invites you to pause and take stock. That’s how this book got started,” write Natapoff and Charles in their introduction. “Many of us in the legal academy have been grappling recently with our roles as legal scholars and teachers, and our relationship to the American legal experiment,” the pair stated.

 Grappling with changes that have come at us non-stop since the second Trump administration took office in January 2025. 

 In case you haven’t been keeping notes, a partial list of the administration’s actions includes: 

--mass deportations of foreign-born individuals; 

--the downsizing of federal agencies and the wholesale firing of civil servants; 

--the implementation of tariffs; 

--withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement; 

--bolstering coal-industry development while abandoning solar and wind projects; 

--directing ICE agents to round up immigrants; 

--opening federal lands to oil exploration and increased timber production; 

--seeking to curtail mail-in and absentee voting; 

--ending funding for public broadcasting; 

--going to war with Iran.

 America Unfinished puts many of these actions in context by providing history so that, instead of just reeling with the headlines, we can fully understand what’s happened.  

 Back to Professor Freeman for a moment: “Shortly after the president took office, the Justice Department was swiftly converted into a political weapon, with the president personally directing investigations and prosecutions of political foes, in a drastic shift from prior administrations… Scores of career prosecutors and officials resigned rather than follow orders they viewed as unlawful or unethical, and thousands more employees left the department, in a mass exodus unparalleled in the nation’s history,” she noted.

Little wonder that Natapoff and other members of the Harvard Law faculty feel the need to remind the public of how America has always placed its faith in being a country of laws.

The inaction of Congress is also taken up in the collection. “Today, the Supreme Court has replaced our national representatives in Congress as the forum for resolving our most fundamental disagreements,” noted Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, whose own book on the subject will be published later this year.

As America celebrates 2026 as the 250th year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, concern is raised about the democratic process. “Public confidence in American democracy is in crisis … Large numbers of people believe, with good reason, that government is unresponsive, captured by special interests and fundamentally out of touch with their lives,” stated Sharon Block. 

“Under this new America, opposition is punished, loyalty is pardoned, and the rule of law is in tatters,” wrote Andrew Manuel Crespo.

Sixty-two different viewpoints with one unifying theme: democracy is a work in progress that you best not take for granted. In the book, former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer quotes Sandra Day O’Connor, another Supreme Court jurist: “The practice of democracy is not passed down through the gene pool. It must be taught and learned anew by each generation.”

Some of the learning might start with America Unfinished.