May 4, 2026

Jamal Greene Reconsiders the American Founding at 2026 Montgomery Foundation Lecture

At Southwestern Law School’s 2026 Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Foundation Lecture, Columbia Law Professor Jamal Greene offered a sweeping challenge to one of the country’s most enduring constitutional myths: that the United States became a true republic in 1787 and that later generations have merely been tasked with preserving it.

It did not, Greene argued.

The lecture, delivered March 23, 2026, and titled A Republic, If We Can Build It, moved from the founding era through Reconstruction and into the social movements of the 20th century, Greene contended that the Constitution, as written and ratified, emerged from a profoundly exclusionary political order—one that cannot credibly be treated as the singular or definitive expression of “we the people.”

“The Constitution written in 1787 simply was not a republican document,” Greene said. “It did not build a republic for us to keep.”

Greene, a leading constitutional scholar whose work focuses on constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, the law of the political process, and the structure of legal argument, delivered the annual lecture before Southwestern students, faculty, alumni, and guests. He was introduced by Rachel VanLandingham, Irwin R. Buchalter Professor of Law at Southwestern Law, who highlighted his scholarship, public service, and national influence on debates over constitutional interpretation.

Greene opened with Benjamin Franklin’s famous reply at the close of the Constitutional Convention—“A republic, if you can keep it”—and argued that the line has come to anchor a flattering but misleading national story. In that story, the Constitution represents the nation at its best, while later political conflict is understood as a falling away from founding ideals.

Greene urged the audience to look more closely at who actually participated in the creation of the Constitution and whose interests it served. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention, he noted, were selected by state legislatures chosen through voting systems that excluded women, most nonwhite Americans, and many white men without property. Those exclusions were not incidental, he argued; they shaped the document itself.

He pointed to provisions barring states from issuing paper money or altering contractual obligations—measures that removed from democratic politics the kinds of debt relief and economic reforms many small farmers had demanded. He also underscored the Constitution’s protections for slavery, including the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause, as evidence that the document reflected the power of a narrow political class rather than a genuinely representative public.

Greene extended that critique to Reconstruction. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, he said, were extraordinary achievements, but they did not by themselves resolve the deeper democratic problem. Those amendments were written by a Congress made up entirely of white men at a time when Black Americans and women remained almost wholly excluded from political participation.

“To this day, even progressives often laud the 14th Amendment … as the gem of the Constitution,” Greene said. “Which, with all due respect, is offensive.”

That argument formed the foundation of Greene’s broader claim: that America’s most important constitutional transformations did not occur solely through the formal written Constitution, but through later democratic struggle by people excluded from the original constitutional bargain.

He identified three such turning points: the constitutional revolution of the 1930s, the Black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In each case, Greene argued, major constitutional change followed when previously marginalized groups gained the power to organize, mobilize, and force institutions to respond.

“These changes in constitutional law and governance came about because people who were previously silenced were finally given a voice and the tools needed to use that voice,” he said.

The lecture closed on Greene’s most provocative claim: that Americans should begin thinking seriously about what it would mean to write a constitution that truly reflects the people the nation has become.

In a moment he described as one of intense polarization and “terrifying moves toward authoritarian consolidation within the executive branch,” Greene acknowledged that such a project may seem remote. Yet he argued that continued reverence for an exclusionary founding may itself be part of the problem.

“The question,” he said, “is not whether to write a new constitution for the diverse people we are today, but how to do so.”