Presented by the New-York Historical Society, the Institute for Constitutional History, New York University, and the American Historical Association.

Saturday, April 12, 2014, 9:30-4:30

Spend your Saturday immersed in the Constitution. This FREE full-day professional development program will feature brief remarks and a Q&A with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, as well as sessions with Q&A led by preeminent constitutional scholars and education professionals.

All participants will receive a copy of Justice Sotomayor’s book My Beloved World. Coffee will be served.

Advance registration is required.

This program is presented by the New-York Historical Society, the Institute for Constitutional History, New York University, and the American Historical Association.

Sessions:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor 
Justice Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the nation’s highest court and a native of the Bronx, will deliver brief remarks on the importance of strong teachers and civic education in her own life and in our schools today. She will then take questions from participants on related topics.

Sanford Levinson, “Our Undemocratic Constitution”
Professor Levinson will discuss the archaic and undemocratic characteristics of the Constitution, how they contribute to the dysfunctional government in Washington, and the kinds of constitutional reforms needed to address the document’s failings.

Sanford Levinson is the author of Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It), and Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance. Levinson is W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School.

Eric Foner, “How the Civil War and Reconstruction Changed the Constitution”
Professor Foner, the nation’s leading Reconstruction historian, will dissect the 14th and 15th Amendments and track how the Reconstruction Amendments have helped to shape the struggle for equal rights from the time of their adoption to the present.

Eric Foner’s classic history Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 won the Bancroft Prize, and his recent work The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery won the Pulitzer Prize in History among other awards. He is also the author of many other distinguished works of history, including Give Me Liberty!, a single-authored US History textbook. Foner is Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.

Linda Greenhouse, “Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court in the Obama Era”
Professor Greenhouse will assess the most controversial decisions of the Roberts Court on such key issues as affirmative action, campaign finance, and Obamacare.

Linda Greenhouse teaches at Yale Law School. She covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times for 30 years and currently writes a biweekly opinion column on the Supreme Court and the law for the Times web site.

Strategies for Teaching the Constitution
Professors of Education will lead a pedagogical workshop focused on how to take the historical insights and documents discussed in the historical sessions and convert them into thought-provoking constitutional history lessons in high school classrooms. This session will be led collaboratively by Professors Robert Cohen of NYU‘s Social Studies program and History department, Diana Turk of Brandeis University‘s Teacher Education Program, Laura Dull of SUNY New Paltz‘s Secondary Social Studies program, NYU doctoral student Stacie Brensilver, a former social studies teacher at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, and Mia Nagawiecki, director of education at the New-York Historical Society.

This program is FREE. Coffee will be provided. Register here.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.