How to Take the Constitution Seriously

In honor of the anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution on September 17, 1787, AEI’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies division marked Constitution Day with a lecture by Yuval Levin. Levin’s lecture was the 13th in a series named for distinguished AEI scholar Walter Berns. Read the PDF. Introduction It’s a great honor to deliver this 13th annual Constitution Day Lecture. I’ve gotten to attend all the prior dozen lectures, and so when Gary Schmitt suggested I be the speaker this year, I was both daunted and honored. The prior speakers set a bar I can only aspire to. But it’s an honor above all because the lecture is named for Walter Berns, one of my heroes. I got to know Walter a little in the last decade or so of his life, though I certainly didn’t know him personally nearly as well as some others here. But I’ve spent an enormous amount of time with Walter’s writing—learning from him in the way that you can only really learn from the written words of a profound and brilliant thinker. I’ve learned from Walter about patriotism and civic education, about John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and the nature of the liberal society. But I have especially and above all learned from Walter about the US Constitution. Some of what he taught me was substantive and particular. He was right about the First Amendment half a century ago, for instance, and the fact that constitutional and judicial thought (including on the right) has taken a different path reflects poorly on that different path and reflects well on Walter.