Goucher Celebrates Constitution Day 2009

Release date: October 07, 2009 |

Goucher College will celebrate national Constitution Day on Wednesday, October 7, with a luncheon featuring Maryland State Senator Jamie Raskin (D-Montgomery County). The event will be held at noon in Buchner Hall of the Alumnae/i House.

During lunch, Raskin will present a lecture titled “One Nation Under the Constitution: The Separation of Church and State and the Future of American Democracy.” There will be 40 spots available for lunch, and reservations will be made on a first-come, first-served basis. Students, faculty, staff, and alumnae/i who would like to attend should contact Gigi Greenfield in the President’s Office as soon possible at gigi.greenfield@goucher.edu.

The Washington Post has described Raskin, who is also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law and director of its Law and Government Program, as the Maryland Senate’s “authority on constitutional issues.”

Also a champion of civil liberties, Raskin received the Distinguished Service Award from the American Humanist Association in 2008 for “standing up for intellectual freedom and the separation of church and state.”

He has written dozens of essays and law review articles and several books, including the 2003 Washington Post bestseller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, an analysis of conservative judicial activism and its corrosive effect on political democracy, and We the Students, which analyzes Supreme Court decisions affecting America’s students and has been called “the bible of the new movement for constitutional literacy.” 

In 1999, Raskin founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, which has sent hundreds of law students into public high schools to teach thousands of students a semester-long course in constitutional literacy. The Marshall-Brennan Project now operates at 10 law schools.

Raskin is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.  He is also an active pro bono lawyer and has successfully represented high school students facing censorship, Greenpeace, and the Service Employees International Union and other labor groups defending their free speech rights. 

Legislation passed by Congress in 2004 requires every federally aided educational institution in the United States to hold an annual program marking the anniversary of the approval of the Constitution in 1787.

Goucher’s four previous Constitution Day programs have been notable successes; speakers have been former United States Senator Paul S. Sarbanes; former Maryland Secretary of State Mary D. Kane; State Senator Richard S. Madaleno Jr.; and William J. Murphy, a lawyer with the Baltimore firm Murphy & Shaffer LLC who represented one of the detainees held by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.