ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

Dean Harold Koh shared his constitutional vision at the Fifth Annual ACS National Convention. Video and a transcript of his remarks can be found here. The following is an excerpt:

What I am urging . . . is that we go back to the future, both in restoring our constitutional principles and in restoring our human rights principles. The future of a progressive public law lies in reviving principles honored in the past, and dishonored since 9/11.


There is much we do not know about what lies ahead, but we do already know a few things. Terrorism will continue to plague the next Administration, as it has this one. The common feature of most of the emerging problems in a globalizing century— terrorism, trafficking, WMD, avian flu, the environment, AIDS, cloning, global warming—will require global solutions. Ours will remain an exceptional country, with unique capacity to fill global vacuums, to shape global regimes, and to generate those global solutions.

We must return to a foreign policy strategy that is based not on unilateralism and power politics, and freedom from fear, but on time-honored principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law: promoting democracy from the bottom up, then using international law and diplomacy to mobilize global cooperation among global democracies to solve global problems.

To enable that global rule of law strategy, we need to return to a domestic constitutional vision based on Youngstown, not Curtiss-Wright, a theory not of the imperial president, but of constitutional powers shared among the executive, congress and the courts, and overseen by a transnational process in which the global media, NGO networks, and ordinary citizens all play important roles.

In short, we can move toward a just future, but to do so we have to go back to the future, by renovating old constitutional and human rights frameworks for the modern day. . . .

Our job—all of us here—is to make sure that our constitutional ideas are better. Because making our constitutional ideas better, and ensuring that they truly protect our constitutional ideals, is the fundamental and indispensable role of the American Constitution Society. And if our Constitution wins, we win, no matter what the results may be on election day.