Dialogues in International History
This podcast intends to contribute to public education by offering listeners thorough and serious conversations on topics in international history and the history of international relations. It features interviews with authors of new monographs and recent books by historians and specialists.
Dialogues in International History
Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles, *America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance: An Essay Collection from Harvard Law School Faculty*. Cambridge, MA: MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Press, 2026.
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This year commemorates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a time when the United States is grappling with profound challenges to its legal structure, governance systems, and civic values. The foundational principles of pluralism are being questioned. The nation is witnessing deep political divides, worries that the economic framework is failing to provide equal opportunities, and a technological upheaval that could transform our understanding of what it means to be human. This anthology brings together more than 50 legal scholars from the Harvard Law School faculty to explore this crucial moment in American law and governance. Edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles, this collection focuses on the audacious experiment in American legal governance that began in 1776, a topic that remains hotly contested after 250 years. Some essays examine the recent surge in executive power, particularly its alarming willingness to resort to violence, both domestically and internationally. Other essays probe the persistent divides among workers, consumers, and markets, posing difficult questions about democratic accountability in our market-driven economy. Furthermore, some contributors reflect on the future of our knowledge and governance institutions as they navigate the challenges posed by technological and informational disruptions. Engaging and thought-provoking, this collection not only enriches essential discussions crucial for a thriving democracy at this pivotal moment but also for the future.
Hello, welcome to the Dialogues and International History podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat, and today it's my privilege to engage in dialogue with Alexandra Natahoff. We will discuss her newly published book, which she has co-edited with G Riel Charles, America Unfinished, 250 Years of Law and Governance. And it has a collection from Harvard Law School faculty, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts by MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press 2026. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence during which the United States is confronting fundamental challenges to its legal framework. Governance institutions and civic culture. Established principles of pluralism are under scrutiny. The country is experiencing significant political division, concerns that the economic system is failing to offer equal opportunities, and a technological revolution that may redefine what it means to be distinctly human. This anthology unites over 50 legal scholars from the Harvard Law School faculty to examine this pivotal moment in American law and governance edited by Alexandra Natzepoff and Guy O'Riel Charles. This collection centers on the bold experiment in American legal governance that commenced in 1776, a subject still fiercely debated after 250 years. Some essays delve into the contemporary increase in executive power, particularly its recent and notable readiness to employ violence, both within the country and abroad. Other essays investigate enduring rifts among workers, consumers, and markets, raising challenging questions about democratic accountability in our market-oriented economy. Additionally, some contributors discuss the future of our knowledge and governance institutions as they face pressures from the upheavals brought about by the technological and informational advancements. Dynamic and thought-provoking, this collection not only contributes to essential discussions vital for a flourishing democracy at this historic juncture, but also for the years ahead. Alexandra Natopov is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Alexandra Natopov will be undertaking this interview by herself. Alexandra, it is an honor to be with you today.
SPEAKER_00Ari, thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_02To begin, can you kindly tell us about yourself? What inspired you to enter the world of law? What inspired you to enter the world of legal scholarship? And what inspired you to undertake this particular book project?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'll I'll start with your last question because it answers a little bit of all of them, I think. Uh I've been a law professor, well, legal scholar for about 20 years now. And my colleague, uh, as you mentioned, Professor G. Ariel Charles, who I co-edited this volume with, we've been colleagues now for many years, and we have grappled over this time with what it means to be a legal scholar, a law professor, to teach law, to be engaged in um thinking about the significance of American, of American law. Both of us have been attorneys in prior lives. Um, so it's different to write and think and teach about law than it is to practice it. And the end of last year uh we were uh grappling with this question: what does it mean to not just to be a legal scholar, but for in our cases to be a legal scholar and a professor at Harvard Law School, which uh has been around itself for 200 years and holds uh an influential and eminent place in our conversations about law, American law. And we asked ourselves, uh, what should we be doing at this moment? What should we be thinking about and engaging in this moment when so many aspects of the American legal system have been challenged? Um, so many of the so many aspects of the American legal system are straining at the seams, as it were. Uh there's enormous conflict, changes in the legal profession, changes of legal norms, changes at the highest level of governance. And we thought what we should do is do what Harvard law professors do, which is we should share our work. We should grapple out loud with our um with our respective areas of expertise, and we should do it in um uh not not only in the way that we typically do it, which is each of us engaging our own areas, but we should try to do it collectively and we should engage our entire faculty in this conversation. And that was the genesis of this book. So this book is 62 essays from 62 different Harvard Law School professors. Over half the faculty contributed a short essay as a result of the invitation. And uh it's 62 different essays, about 62 different things, uh, different areas of American law, but they are all inspired by this challenging moment in American law and governance by the 250th. And uh we're we were very um pleased and honored that so many of our faculty came together on this project.
SPEAKER_02What were the most difficult aspects of putting this book together? How did you overcome and circumvent such challenges?
SPEAKER_00Uh well, one was the the no footnotes rule, um, which might sound facetious, but we in order to make this book accessible, to make it truly available to uh as many Americans as possible, as many readers and thinkers as possible, we thought it was very important to make it clear and engaging and and to ask that the essays be um relatively short. And that meant that our colleagues could not write in the ways that they are accustomed to writing legal scholarship. We're used to writing um, you know, 50-page articles with hundreds of footnotes. Our colleagues have written um hundreds of books between them, and this is not that project. And so, in some way, the invitation to offer a more uh a pithier, shorter, clearer uh offering and insight about what are you thinking about right now? What do you think America should be thinking about right now? And so the collection's a little bit unconventional. We're unaware actually of any other book uh essay collection like this one, in which a faculty like Harvard Law School has come together to offer so many offerings of this nature.
SPEAKER_02In light of what you just said, to what degree did current events make this book either easier to write or harder to write? To what degree might the second Trump presidency have been arguably a catalyst to make you stimulated to put this book together, or to what degree did it make it more challenging to put this book together?
SPEAKER_00All of the above. So it was certainly a catalyst. Uh, we're seeing massive uh changes and challenges to our legal infrastructure, to legal norms within and without the profession, norms on the bench, norms at the highest level of federal governance. Uh there's new kinds of litigation, there are new kinds of um, in my I write about criminal law, new kinds of prosecutions, new kinds of pardons. Uh, it's it's sort of it's hard to overstate how many changes and challenges are occurring at the moment. So the the Trump administration was certainly a catalyst and an inspiration um for the project. At the same time, America has been doing this for 250 years. This is not the first time that our legal governance structure has been under um uh pressure and gone through enormous changes. And so one of the wonderful things I think about this collection is it locates the challenges of today in a 250-year history of legal governance, of a legal democracy that has seen many, many profound uh uh conflicts and challenges.
SPEAKER_02What does this book offer to a non-American reader?
SPEAKER_00So I so because the United States is so intimately intertwined with our global governance structure, with our global economy, uh, and because, of course, the American population itself uh is connected to and is uh in many cases from many other countries, you can't really talk about American law and governance in isolation. It is uh inescapably embedded in the global economy, in the global legal structure, and um the our global culture. And of and in many ways, all eyes are on the United States as it makes massive uh and influential and oft and um often controversial decisions at the moment. There are several sections of the book that specifically engage those questions. Um many of the essays I think engage the international context implicitly, but there are a number of uh essays and sections that engage the international arena explicitly. There's an entire section on the international legal order, with numerous legal experts writing about many, many facets of the United States' role, both currently and historic, um uh in the global order, in the global order around the question around questions of the use of force and violence, around the question of international human rights, around the questions of international uh intellectual property, um, which which uh is is a fascinating essay by my colleague uh Professor Okediji. There is a section devoted to war. Uh, of course, we are at war at the moment, um, and it it's impossible to understand what's happening in um American law and governance uh around that question without um you know without understanding how it is loc how how it relates to the rest of the global community. Two essays in that in the section on war, one by my colleague, the historian Jill Lapore, who your listeners may recall won a Pulitzer Prize a couple of months ago. Uh, she's an extraordinary expert. And she writes about the history of the war powers, the power to go to war, to dec for the United States to declare war. Uh and she tells the tale of how uh, on the one hand, the Constitution confers that authority clearly and explicitly on Congress. It is Congress who holds the power to declare war, not the president. And nevertheless, since Vietnam, the president has in fact, on the ground, uh many times initiated the use of force, initiated war without uh without Congress's authorization. And she explains this history all the way back to the founding, how the founders thought about it, why they put that in the Constitution. Um, Abraham Lincoln had some choice words to say about uh uh the power to go to war, which he thought rightfully belonged to Congress, and that uh a president who declared war would be unforgivably monarchical. That was a that was that's the kind of thing that kings do, not democracies. And we have come a long, long way from that conversation. Uh and now uh Professor Lapore argues that Congress has permitted the executive, the president, to declare war in effect so many times that it has eroded its own congressional constitutional authority. Uh, it's a it's it's a fascinating and important essay. Um, the section also contains an essay about a very different aspect of war, which is how the United States treats its veterans. Uh your listeners may be aware in uh in the headlines over the past week there have been uh an enormous amount of coverage of the conditions on the USS Lincoln, the uh warcraft, the um uh uh the aircraft carrier that had been deployed to the Middle East in support of the war in Iran, and the conditions on that uh aircraft carrier that uh some sailors um have tried to jump overboard, that the families are deeply concerned about the mental health and physical health of their family members on board. Uh, well, this the essay by my colleague Daniel Nagan, who runs our veterans clinic, uh puts those challenges in perspective, and he documents how actually uh the United States has been uh uh not uh has been has fallen down on the task of taking care of its veterans. The levels of mental health challenges, of sickness, of homelessness, of poverty in our veteran population is a terrible reflection on our legal governance choices about how to take care of these um uh the people who have served. And so just these two essays give you a sense of the breadth of the kinds of conversations that these um that our colleagues have engaged in. And each one, I just to just to assure your listeners, no essay is more than five pages. So you can hear from Pulitzer Prize winning Jill Lepore uh, in her words, in a very direct uh and clear and engaging way. You can learn about the history of our treatment of veterans of our um engagement with internat the international global order in this very clear and accessible and direct uh way. So, among other things, I think this collection is is a really remarkable pedagogical tool.
SPEAKER_02In light of what you've shared, are there any essays that have particularly resonated with you on a personal level that were included in this volume?
SPEAKER_00Oh I have to say so many of them. Um because each is each essay is uh uh a contribution from one of my colleagues uh when asked, what do you think everyone should be thinking about right now? And so I uh I learned an enormous amount from this collection. I'll flag a couple of my favorites, but I I I can't I can't play favorites, um, but some of them are are per I I found particularly illuminating or engaging. There's a section, uh as I mentioned, I I teach and write in criminal law. That's my area of expertise. There's a section in the book called The Future of Economic Governance. And Harvard Law School has some of the leading um scholars on corporate law, on labor law, on uh uh financial regulation and economic and legal economics. And this section of maybe half a dozen essays is uh a wonderful array of challenging essays who all appear to disagree with each other about what the question even is. How should we understand the future of our legal infrastructure for running our economy? So a couple of my colleagues um uh write about the evolution and in some cases the devolution of corporate law itself. One of my colleagues writes about the evolution and devolution of labor law. Uh, one of my colleagues, uh Professor Desan writes about this is a fascinating essay, about the design of money. We rarely think about money as a thing that needs to be designed, but it is a credit instrument and our money could look differently. Professor Desan uh takes us on a tour of all the choices that we have made, that the United States has made in the design of the credit, the credit token that we call money, and how it has had uh some devastatingly regressive effects that we could design our money in a more inclusive and um uh uh egalitarian way, but we don't. Really eye-opening essay. Um, all of that is to say that these half a dozen essays raise very different questions, uh, propose very different frameworks, and yet somehow altogether are all about the same thing. How shall we look ahead at our economic governance structure and our legal governance structure for how we run our economy and how should that look in a democracy? It's a really wonderful, wonderful section. And then throughout there, just uh the last essay of uh of the entire book by my colleague Molly Brady is about community and property law. Professor Brady is an eminent scholar and historian of property law, and she charts how our how the property legal system, how we build community, how we how we define property, how we engage in zoning, the nature of urban sprawl has undermined many of our physical communities, even as we have invested in digital property and intellectual property and the and the uh digital and remote infrastructure of the internet and social media in ways that uh that have further exacerbated the the devolution and the and the erosion of physical community. And she brings these um these areas of expertise together in a really uh insightful and sometimes heart really heartbreaking um and innovative way. So those again, there's so many I can't I can't list them all, but those are just a little taste of the kinds of things that your readers might come across if they if they thumb through the essays in this book.
SPEAKER_02Can you tell us how this book is organized? Can you tell us about the different sections of this book?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Uh so there are about 15 different sections, and they're organic sections. We did not tell our colleagues what to write, as you can imagine. It's like at your peril, you tell 62 Harvard law professors what they need to write. So everybody wrote what they felt needed to be written at this moment, but they came together in some very natural um organizational uh ways. So there are 15 sections. Some of the sections are frankly what you might expect from a book from Harvard law professors. There's a there's a section on the Supreme Court, there's a section on the federal administrative state, there's a section on free speech uh and dissent. There um uh there is a section on election law, there's a section on democracy, but at the same time, there are sex there are there are many essays that you might not immediately expect um uh to uh to have come out of this project. There's a section on environmental law that includes an essay about food policy and how food policy intersects not with climate change and um with with poverty law. It's fascinating, fascinating essay. There's a section on the future of knowledge in our digital world with essays on AI, on the internet, on intellectual property, um, and the challenges that we face going forward. There is, as I mentioned, there's a section on international law, there's a section on war, there's a section on legal philosophy for the philosophers uh out there who who'd like to think about legal theory. Uh, and then the last section is a section on community and civic culture. It has an essay by our colleague. The former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who writes about our founding documents and what we can learn about our civic culture and what we should carry forward from those documents today. And as I mentioned, this essay from Professor Brady about community and property law. So there's an enormous range of flavors, if you will. You might think of this as a kind of intellectual cookbook. Nobody reads a cookbook from beginning to end. That's not how you engage a cookbook. You thumb through for the thing that you're looking for for dinner that night. And I think that thumbing through these sections, these 62 essays, readers, there'll be there'll be something here, I think, for every reader who is interested in these kinds of questions.
SPEAKER_02As a follow-up question, to what degree does this book incorporate different and diverging perspectives? To what degree did you uh intentionally strive to incorporate diverse and differing perspectives among the authors and their contributions?
SPEAKER_00So the this collection is naturally diverse because our faculty is large and disagrees about many, many things. Um and so what you'll see in the essays is 62 different takes on this question of American law and governance through the lenses of these different areas of law, these different subject matters. Um and we did, as editors, Professor Charles and I, we exercised no editorial control over who uh contributed to the volume. We invited our entire faculty. Um we did not exclude any full active member of the faculty if they were not, if they didn't write, if there's um a professor who didn't write, it's because for whatever reason they didn't have the time or they weren't able to or they chose not to, but we we did not make that uh call. It was open to everyone. And as I mentioned before, we didn't tell people what to write. We knew that the collection would be diverse because we know our colleagues. Uh, but I think even Professor Charles and I were surprised and gratified at the breadth and depth of the difference and the disagreement that showed up um showed up in this collection.
SPEAKER_02Can you explain the term dead hand of the past? What does it mean?
SPEAKER_00So that's it's kind of a term of art. Um your listeners may be aware of the uh arguments around and the uh legal and um scholarly and public debate over a uh a philosophy sometimes called originalism. It's a philosophy that the Supreme Court uh is currently very um uh uh enamored of, but has um not always been uh uh in the limelight in this way. It's the idea that we should interpret law today in light of the original intent of the people who wrote it. And of course, for constitutional purposes, that means the founders. That means that under various forms of originalism, and there are as many flavors of originalism um as there are of uh you know uh uh flavors of uh chocolate ice cream, um, everyone has sort of a different take on what it means to be an originalist. But the the basic idea is that if they wrote it, then we should adhere to their intent, the intent of the drafters, which means that for a constitution that is 250 years old, we the idea is to look to the intent of the original framers. And you can immediately see how controversial it would be to look to the intent 250 years ago of people um uh who had a very different view of democracy than we did, a very different view of the citizenry. Uh, of course, uh so for example, I myself could not have voted 250 years ago. I was not included as a as a woman, I was not included in the framers of view of we the people. I was not included in um uh the the idea that all men are created equal. They actually used that term um uh uh uh with significance. And yet they are, of course, the drafters of our founding documents that we still rely on and gave us many of the frameworks that we continue to rely on, and this year, 2026, that we celebrate. We celebrate the many of the principles in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, even though they may not they may have in our uh they may have different significance and different meaning today. And so the dead hand of the past is a way, um it's sort of a ding, if you will. It's a it's it's a complaint uh about the idea that two a 250-year-old model of governance uh should not weigh us down. That it's the the hand of the past is dead and weighing on us. That's that's it's the uh that's kind of the flavor. And one of my colleagues, Professor Stephen Sachs, writes in his essay about um about this complaint, and he defends the idea uh the that just because our antecedents, our legal antecedents, our founding documents, the declaration, the the constitution um are old does not mean um that they lack uh they lack value, that they lack importance, and that we should not rely on them for guidance. And he points out, uh he's a very he's a very witty writer. Uh so he points out that law, actually, all law is always prospective. We will always look back on law. He quips that all law will always be prospective until we invent a time machine and can go backwards in time. And so he says, so so that's and that's true, he says, for the Constitution. That's true uh for the ideas of the founders. Of course, we disagree with many of them today, and yet, nevertheless, many of their ideas have enabled the democracy uh that we have today at the very same time. So he he he he highlights that tension. He defends the looking backwards as well as looking forwards to give us a sense of maybe the dead hand of the past isn't so bad after all.
SPEAKER_02What insights are presented here regarding the history of corporate law in the United States?
SPEAKER_00Uh so I mentioned a little while ago that there's this wonderful section on the future of economic governance, and a couple of those essays are very specifically about uh about corporate law. Professor Pargendler writes um uh really a kind of a mini masterclass, a sweeping history of American corporate law, uh, how it how it grew, how it supported the kinds of capital markets and investment structure that we have come to take for granted in our um capitalist economy. And then she worries about recent developments and the erosion of accountability and transparency um in American corporate law that uh that in many ways we have uh we're letting the the fox guard the hen house. We are letting corporations rewrite the rules of corporate law in ways that undermine the stability of our capital markets and our corporate infrastructure. And she lays out those uh those concerns. Um Professor Rowe, another colleague of ours who's an expert, uh also an expert on corporate law, um, uh gives a history of um what he calls anti-corporate populism, that there's a robust history in this country of anti-corporate politics, the big banks and um and big corporations fueled much of the New Deal, as he pointed, the the the populist redistributive ethos of the New Deal. And he explains, you asked me uh what surprised me or what I've learned. So so I learned a lot. I I I I I I didn't I didn't really know this story before. He explains how that anti-corporate populism shaped American corporate law so that it looks quite different, for example, from corporate law in Europe, which lacks that kind of um populist antipathy. And then he talks about the new mega corporation, the digital corporations, the that Meta and Google and Amazon, and he wonders where that populism went. What why do we not see the same kinds of anti-corporate populist rage aimed at these um uh at these entities? And he speculates a little bit about why that that might be the case. So there's the sweep of corporate law, there's some history, uh, there are some predictions, and there's some anxiety there uh uh in this discussion of American corporate law.
SPEAKER_02What insights are presented here regarding the relationship between law and ethics in American history.
SPEAKER_00Uh, the relationship between law and ethics. So, in in the legal conversation, the legal profession and the legal academy, uh, we slice that pie any number of different ways. So notice how we might say something like, our law embodies our ethics. Isn't that what law is supposed to do? Isn't law supposed to embody what we think is right, what we think is good, what we think is just? And of course, in my world, um my area of expertise, criminal law, that conversation um is is right out there in the open. We we we talk about the the ethical import of criminal law all the time. Is this just? Is it um what what what values and what ethics are we trying to pre preserve, create, elevate, or undermine with our criminal law? So there's there's an intrinsic ethical component of having a legal conversation all the time. But then there's another use of the term ethics, which is a little more of a term of art, which is legal ethics, which typically in the legal profession refers to how do how are you supposed to behave as a lawyer? And it's a conversation that we have with our students all the time, because there's an enormous responsibility in becoming a lawyer because you have so much power. And my students don't realize this yet because they're worried about exams and they're worried about becoming a lawyer, but they were gonna, they're gonna go out into the world and they are going to work on cases that will determine uh people's liberty, their life and death, billions of dollars worth of value, people's families, the existence or dissolution of a corporation, um the life and death of cities. They're going to be engaged as attorneys, and the work that they do is going to have enormous ethical uh impact, potentially on um millions of lives and uh and sometimes devastating impact on an individual or their families. And that is an ethical obligation that uh this is not that law is not mechanical, being a lawyer is not mechanical. And so, part uh, and especially the essays at the end of the book on the legal profession, on legal education, and of course the last section on um civic our civic values and our community as lawyers and as legal scholars, many of my colleagues grapple with this challenge. What does it mean to be an ethical lawyer in this day and age? How should we be how should we behave? How should we teach our students to behave? What is it, the great responsibilities that we have taken upon ourselves to be attorneys to represent people? Um and even uh even as legal scholars, even though so I don't represent represent people anymore, but I still but working in criminal law, the ethical implications are inescapable. And so uh many again, many of my colleagues and many of these essays grapple with that perennial question of how to wield this extremely powerful tool that we call law.
SPEAKER_02What does the term legal nihilism mean?
SPEAKER_00So you took that from an essay. Um there's a wonderful essay by my colleague uh Professor Scott Brewer, and it's called Real Legal Nihilism. Uh, Professor Brew is also a philosopher. And I think what and I I I won't I I I can't speak for him. Everyone should read the essay if they're interested, uh, in his um in his take, which is I want to say it's almost poetic. Uh it's a it's an unusual essay. But the idea of legal nihilism is this idea that it's so changeable that law is changeable, that values are changeable. Of course, law is, of course, um made by people, it's a communal product. We make it up, we invent it and reinvent it. You and I spoke just moments ago about the dead hand of the past. Um, we we take law, we revise it, we build it for the future, we change it. How do we know we're right? How do we know we're what is true? How could we possibly know what is good when we ourselves are building this edifice and when we are coming together to agree? Uh and so he explores the idea in this essay that uh sometimes the term nihilism is associated with with destruction or kind of end of the world quality, the idea that there's no there there, there's no right or wrong there. The law cannot tell you what is wrong or right, the law itself um is a tool, is a tool of power, often uh abuse of power, um, that justice is hard to pin down, maybe impossible to pin down. And as I said, the essay is a little bit literary. It uh it relies on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, but it also quotes from the novel, the famous novel, Catch 22, about the um the slippery nature of law and power. And so it's really an exploration, in a way related to the conversation we just had about ethics, which is is it possible to have good law? Uh is does law ever tell us what is good, or is it uh is it a little bit of a um a bait and switch?
SPEAKER_02What does this book's title mean? Can you explain it?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Uh thank you for asking. So the title is America Unfinished. 250 years of law and governance. And um we actually stole the title a little bit from the Gettysburg Address. Uh that's in particular the term unfinished, because we thought it really captured the spirit of the legal endeavor and the spirit that we are trying to capture in this book, which is that this is a work in progress. Law is a work in progress, and America is a work in progress. Um, the book itself reproduces the Declaration of Independence at the beginning, so readers can check back and see what it actually said. You don't have to take our word for it, you can go look. Um, and it also reproduces the Gettysburg Address uh because uh because we we um took this insight from um from that founding era, that founding foundational document. And your readers, so everybody knows the phrase, I think, from the Gettysburg Address that Lincoln said there in the middle of the Civil War uh on the battlefield at Gettysburg, the world will little note nor long remember what we say here. Obviously, he was wrong. We are still noting and remember what um what he said there. But the rest of that sentence, which is less often quoted, the rest of that sentence is but the world can never forget what they, the soldiers, did here. It is for us, the living, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus so nobly advanced. The unfinished work. And we thought that that really captured this arc of American legal history that at every stage the Americ our American legal governance structure is unfinished. It was unfinished 250 years ago, they were just building it, it was unfinished during the Civil War, they were rebuilding it, revising it, reconstructing it. And it's unfinished today. We're grappling, um, we're grappling with not only uh challenges in our legal system, to our politics, to this, um, to our uh electoral expectations, but enormous changes in technology, enormous changes in um uh climate change and our economy. And so, in many, many ways, we are always building and rebuilding this unfinished product of American law and American governance and doing our best to hand it down to the next generation in a way um that will be positive. So that's what that's why the book is um is is is titled that way.
SPEAKER_02How does the study address matters of racial and social inequality in American legal history?
SPEAKER_00So I'll flag again, since I write in criminal law, it's it's almost impossible to write about the American criminal system without writing about racial inequality and economic inequality, because so much of our criminal system um disproportionately impacts the poor, disproportionately impacts working people and the vulnerable, and disproportionately impacts people of color. And so I myself write um uh in the essay for this collection about how our criminal system uh unforgivably really uh treats the wealthy, the well-resourced, and the powerful pretty well. Actually, rule of law works pretty well for people who have the wherewithal and the status to defend themselves, but that's not true for the vast majority of ordinary Americans. And uh and the benefits of rule of law, the protections of rule of law, the protections of the Bill of Rights and constitutional rights, all too often are not afforded to uh regular Americans who are swept up into the criminal system. But quite a few other essays engage in the history of race and racial inequality and other forms of inequality in in um in quite different ways. So there's a section on uh it's it's called American Identity, Citizenship and Race. And in these half a dozen essays, uh our colleagues grapple with various facets of what does it mean to belong in America? What does it mean to be an American? Of course, these issues are uh um uh front of mind for so many people today in connection with this administration's uh aggressive and uh often violent enforcement. Of immigration law. What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be an American citizen? But of course, we've been having this conversation about race since the founding. And perhaps most legally speaking, since, of course, since, of course, the Civil War and Reconstruction. And so my colleague, Professor Charles, who co-edited this collection, writes a beautiful essay called One People, The Audacious Provocation of America. And he gives us an overview of how the founders, the idea of the Declaration of Independence, the idea that we could be one, that America could be one people, was a radical idea in 1776, that the America, before it was the United States, was already wildly diverse. Of course, it had enslaved people, it had people from all over the world, it had landowners, it had poor people, it had indentured servants, it had people from many different countries and many different socioeconomic classes who spoke many different languages, and of course, famously many different religions, which was an enormous source of conflict and difference at the time. And he says, think about what the founders envisioned. They envisioned the idea of one country united under law for all this difference. Now, of course, the founders had a more cramped view of inclusion than we do today. Their view of inclusion did not include black people at all, did not include women. But even so, they were facing a wildly diverse country, and they thought that we could be brought together under law. And so that essay and a number of other essays about the history of race in this country. My colleague Mike Klarman, Professor Michael Klarman, writes about the resurgence of white supremacy that we are currently seeing in American politics and the toleration for that resurgence that uh might have been unimaginable 20 years ago. Uh uh Annette Gordon, my colleague Annette Gordon Reed, um uh MacArthur-winning Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, uh writes an essay called Making Americans a history, a history of how people, how we have enabled people to become Americans. The paradigmatic group, of course, being African Americans, formerly enslaved African Americans, but not only African Americans. We're constantly having this conversation about who gets to be American. So, in many ways, all throughout this collection, different scholars are grappling with different facets of this question of race and inclusion and belonging and identity and citizenship. And as we've been saying all along, um, they come at this question in many, many different ways.
SPEAKER_02Where and how can someone get a hold of this book?
SPEAKER_00I'm glad you asked that question. So the book is out. It came out on July 4th uh appropriately. We're very excited about that. And it's now for sale. Um, actually, the first print run sold out, so they're printing more. Uh, we're very happy that it's um that it's been so popular so quickly. But you can get it at any independent bookstore. Of course, you can get it online where wherever um you're accustomed to getting books. I do want to flag one um one wonderful feature of the book and and express our gratitude to MIT Press. So MIT Press is the publisher of this book. And in light of the nature of the project, MIT Press agreed that uh in six months, um, so starting in 2027, the book will become open access, meaning it will become available to read for free for anyone, um, anyone in the whole world. And uh and that and that's an enormously generous thing for MIT Press to do. It is they who will um lose the revenue from the sale of the book. We are uh, to the extent that we get any uh royalties, we are donating them to our local public library. So we we will not um uh uh be losing anything, but MIT Press is essentially footing the bill and then making the book available for free. And we're thrilled because we think it is so consistent with the um with the principle of the book that this is a conversation about American law and American democracy, especially at this moment in history with so many controversies and so much polarization and so much disagreement. It's so important that everyone gets to be part of it. Uh this book is not for law professors, it's not just for lawyers, it's not um just for people who are already familiar with these questions. We hope we we design this book to be accessible for as many people as possible. And uh, but it and so we, of course, we hope we hope people will buy the book. But if you don't have $26 right now, I think that's what the the list price is. Uh and many Americans, you know, are are um struggling at the moment or don't, you know, don't have extra at the moment. And we and we didn't want to cut people out of the conversation because um their their lives don't don't permit them that kind of uh extra right now. And so we're really thrilled that MIT Press is making this available so that everybody can be part of this conversation. Everyone who's interested in all these 62 different aspects of American law and governance will be able to pick up this book. Any teacher who wants to assign this as a text can assign it open when it is open access without worrying that their students, that their college students, that their community college students, their high school senior students, that they don't um without worrying that they don't have the money to buy copies of the book. And so I I just um want to express again our gratitude to MIT Press for making that possible.
SPEAKER_02As we bring our dialogue today to a close, can you tell us about where you've devoted your time and attention since completing this book?
SPEAKER_00Um talking to people like you. Uh the point of this book is to contribute to conversation, to generate conversation, to contribute to ongoing conversations. And so I've been um talking with uh folks like you and uh all different kinds of uh commentators and scholars and um podcasters and radio show hosts all over the country to invite people to take a look, to to thumb through this cookbook of intellectual recipes, to uh to share it with their friends, to ask for it in libraries, to um uh maybe ask their teacher to include it in a class or uh or to look forward to it if they don't have $26 at the moment to look forward to it coming out, uh, open access. We we really hope that this book will help people understand new things or or um or bring new questions to the table or serve as fuel for conversations that people are already having. It really couldn't be a more important time for these conversations about our legal infrastructure to be taking place. And so um, of course, we're sharing the book with our students uh in our classes, in our community, but uh we hope that it will be useful and interesting um uh for as many people as possible.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I could not agree more.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_02Uh as we end, I'm just so honored that you trusted me with your time, your work, and attention. Thank you not only for the conversation today, but for the emotional labor behind this book.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02As we end today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbaland, your host in the Dialogue is an international history podcast. Today it's been my honor to engage in dialogue with Alexandra, Nat Apoff, and Guy Uriel Charles regarding their newly uh co-edited book, uh America Unfinished, 250 Years of Law and Governance, an essay collection from Harvard Law School of Faculty, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts by MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press 2026. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, during which the United States is confronting fundamental challenges to its legal framework, governance institutions and civic culture. Established principles of pluralism are under scrutiny. The country is experiencing significant uh political division, concerns that the economic system is failing to offer equal opportunities, and a technological revolution that may redefine what it means to be distinctly human. This anthology unites over 50 legal scholars from the Harvard Law School faculty to examine this pivotal moment in American law and governance edited by Alexandra Natzepov and Guy O'Riel Charles. This collection centers on the bold experiment in American legal governance that commenced in 1776, a subject still fiercely debated after 250 years. Some essays delve into the contemporary increase in executive power, particularly its recent and notable readiness to employ violence, both within the country and abroad. Other essays investigate enduring rifts among workers, consumers, and markets, raising challenging questions about democratic accountability in our market-oriented economy. Additionally, some contributors discuss the future of our knowledge and governance institutions as they face pressures from the upheavals brought about by the technological and informational advancements. Dynamic and thought-provoking, this collection not only contributes to essential discussions vital for a flourishing democracy at this historic juncture, but also for the years ahead. Alexandra Natopov is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Ari.