Knox College announces 'Does the United States Need a New Constitution?' public debate at the historic site of the Fifth Lincoln-Douglas Debate

Galesburg, IL (09/06/2022) — Knox College has announced an array of events to celebrate Constitution Day 2022, including a public debate titled Does the United States Need a New Constitution?

Julie Suk, professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, and Jeffrey Tulis, professor of government, law, and communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin, will debate the topic on Tuesday, September 20, at 7:00 p.m. on the east side lawn of Old Main, the historic site of the 5th Lincoln-Douglas Debate. Each speaker will be allotted approximately 20 minutes to make a presentation, followed by a response and dialogue. There will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.

The debate event will also feature remarks from Knox College President C. Andrew McGadney and Provost and Dean Michael A. Schneider. Thomas Bell, assistant professor of political science, will serve as moderator.

Professor Suk is an interdisciplinary and comparative legal scholar, researching equality at the intersection of law, history, sociology, and politics in the United States and globally. Her recent book We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment is the first and only book to chronicle and assess the twenty-first-century revival of the Equal Rights Amendment, culminating in Virginia's ratification in 2020. She has authored dozens of articles and book chapters about comparative constitutional law; the procedural implementation of equality norms in the United States and Europe; gender quotas; and women, work, and family. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Professor Tulis's work intersects the fields of political theory and American politics, more specifically American political development, constitutional theory, political philosophy, and the American presidency. He is the author of a number of books, including the award-winning The Rhetorical Presidency, and Legacies of Losing in American Politics (with Nicole Mellow). Four collections of essays on The Rhetorical Presidency with responses by Tulis have been published, including a special double issue of Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society, (2007), where his book is described as "one of the two or three most important and perceptive works written by a political scientist in the twentieth century." It received the American Political Science Association's Legacy Award in 2018. He has served as president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association.

The debate will also be available for viewers to stream online; the event can be viewed via knox.edu/constitutionday

Additional events include a free public screening of the film On the Basis of Sex at 2:00 p.m. Sunday, September 18, at the Orpheum Theatre, 57 S Kellogg St, Galesburg. The movie is based on the life and early cases of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

On Tuesday, September 20 from 4:00 to 6:30 p.m. the Knox Student Senate is sponsoring a voter registration drive with members of the Galesburg community. They will be located outside the Hard Knox Cafe on the Knox College campus.

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