In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has relied repeatedly on historical claims to change American law in dramatic ways. The Court's last two terms alone saw the Justices invoke “history and tradition” and the Constitution’s “original meaning” to eliminate the federal right to abortion, restrict gun control measures, and remove constitutional protections for affirmative action in higher education. This trend continued into the Court’s current term, as lawyers offered historical arguments to try to invalidate long-standing federal gun laws, win sweeping immunities for former presidents, and limit the federal government’s ability to regulate industry and business.

The Supreme Court has always employed historical understandings and precedents in its decisions, but its recent calls to history flow from a different source: A commitment to “originalism,” the idea that constitutional rights are defined by—and limited to—the ways the earliest generations of Americans thought about the Constitution’s meaning. By invoking historical understandings to justify its rulings, the Supreme Court has placed historians and the discipline of history at the center of some of the most significant constitutional questions facing the country.

In this roundtable session, annual meeting attendees will learn how historians can respond to this critical moment using the insights and skills that they uniquely can bring to the table. Their guides will be historians Tomiko Brown-Nagin (Harvard University), Jack Rakove (Stanford University), Gautham Rao (American University), and Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University)—four scholars who have been working creatively at the intersections of history, law, and litigation. Joining them as moderator will be Thomas Wolf, Director of Democracy Initiatives at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and organizer of the Historians Council on the Constitution, an innovative new effort to address the Supreme Court’s misuses and mischaracterizations of history.

While the session will likely be most relevant to Americanists, the discussion will focus on the ways that historians can use their shared training in historical methods to grapple with the Supreme Court’s rulings.

Attendees will learn about both critique and action. To start, the roundtable members will introduce attendees to the historians’ case against originalism. Their insights will help attendees address originalism not just as concerned citizens, but as historical experts speaking for their discipline and its values. From there, the historians will highlight some key ways that they and others have been putting their critical perspectives on originalism and related legal issues into practice. Finally, the historians will provide advice to attendees interested in translating the response to originalism into their own communities in their roles as teachers and public explainers. Throughout the session, the roundtable members will draw on their deep, shared experience as scholars, friends-of-the-court, teachers, and public commentators.

Attendees will leave the session with a strong sense of how they can use their historical training to contribute to a broader social movement to change the national conversation on history and the Constitution.