Welcome to The Constitutionalist
The Constitutionalist is dedicated to the intellectual and political work of constitutional democracy. Our authors are open to a range of political perspectives, but we are unified by a capacious understanding of the constitutional endeavor – namely, we believe that constitutions are sustained not only by law, but also by civil society and civic norms. Using our expertise in political philosophy, American political development, public law, and political culture and literature, we aim to foster conversation across disciplinary lines and beyond the confines of academia. We believe this kind of conversation is vital to the creation and maintenance of good constitutions. Though we are interested in what happens elsewhere, our primary focus is on the American experience.
Editor
Benjamin A. Kleinerman is a Professor of Political Science at Baylor University where he teaches classes on political thought and political institutions. He also is on the Board of Directors of the Jack Miller Center. Kleinerman is the Chair of the American Political Thought section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and he has published articles in Perspectives on Politics (APSA), American Political Science Review, Texas Law Review, and several edited volumes including Nomos and The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. He has also been invited to give talks at Yale University, the University of Notre Dame, Xavier University, Kenyon College, and the University of Cincinnati. Kleinerman’s first book, The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power, has been reviewed in The New Republic and Political Science Quarterly. He has also published on other subjects including literature and politics and American political history.
Contributors
Laura K. Field is a writer, political theorist, Scholar in Residence at American University, and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas, focusing on political theory and public law. Field has held faculty positions at Rhodes College in Memphis and Georgetown University, and her research has been published in the Journal of Politics, The Review of Politics, Polity, and The Bulwark. She currently lives in Maryland.
George Thomas is Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions and Director of the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of The (Un)Written Constitution forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He is also the author of The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Madisonian Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and co-author of American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes (West Academic, 2018). His work has appeared in more popular journals such as National Affairs and The American Interest, as well as in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Bulwark.
Susan McWilliams Barndt is Chair and Professor of Politics at Pomona College. She is the co-editor of both the peer-reviewed journal American Political Thought and the American Political Thought book series at the University Press of Kansas. She is the author, most recently, of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (Lexington, 2018) and the editor of several volumes, including A Political Companion to James Baldwin (Kentucky, 2017) and The Best Kind of College: An Insider’s Guide to America’s Small Liberal Arts Colleges (State University of New York 2015). Her writing has been published in journals such as The American Conservative, Boston Review, Bust, Commonweal, Front Porch Republic, The Nation, Perspectives on Political Science, Political Science Quarterly, and The Review of Politics. McWilliams has won several commendations for her work, including the Graves Award in the Humanities and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Jeffrey Tulis is Professor of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a founder and co-editor of the Constitutional Thinking series with the University Press of Kansas. His publications include The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, 1987, Princeton Classics edition, 2017), which received the American Political Science Association’s Legacy Award in 2018, and has been described as “one of the two or three most important and perceptive works written by a political scientist in the twentieth century.” (Critical Review, 2007). His most recent book (co-authored with Nicole Mellow) is Legacies of Losing in American Politics (Chicago, 2018). His recent articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Polity, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, The Bulwark, and Public Seminar.
Greg Weiner, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Assumption University, is an expert in the political thought of the American Founding. A visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, he holds a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University before coming to Assumption. Weiner is the author of four books: Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule and the Tempo of American Politics; American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan; The Political Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy; and Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln and the Politics of Prudence. He has published more than a dozen essays in The New York Times as well as op-eds in The Washington Post. Before his academic career, Weiner was a political aide, consultant and writer in Washington, D.C. for nearly two decades, including several years as communications director for U.S. Senator J. Robert Kerrey of Nebraska.
The views expressed by our contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Jack Miller Center, whose funding supports this endeavor.
The Jack Miller Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to reinvigorating education in America’s founding principles and history, an education vital to thoughtful and engaged citizenship. They support professors and educators who share our mission, offering programs, resources, fellowships, and more to help them teach our nation’s students—from high school through college.