Yale Celebrates Constitution Day

Yale University will participate in the first national Constitution Day with an assembly on Cross Campus at 12:30 p.m. on September 20.

Yale’s first ever “Constitution Hour” will feature a public reading of highlights of the U.S. Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, by representatives of the faculty, staff and student body. Three faculty members will offer brief remarks. The event is free and everyone is welcome to attend.

Akhil Reed Amar, the Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale Law School, will discuss the Preamble, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Amar’s new book, “America’s Constitution: a Biography” (Random House, September 2005), analyzes the Constitution, providing historical and legal context. David Brion Davis, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History and founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, will speak on the Constitution and slavery; and Glenda Gilmore, the Peter V. & C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, will speak on the Constitution and women.

Constitution Day has been observed informally for nine years. President George W. Bush signed a bill on December 8, 2004, designating September 17 as Constitution Day nationwide. The law mandates that schools that receive federal funds from the U.S. Department of Education “implement an educational program pertaining to the United States Constitution ….” Since September 17 falls on a Saturday this year, Constitution Day will be celebrated before or after the weekend by most participating institutions.

When the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, to sign the document that would determine the structure and function of the federal government, four of them were Yale graduates. The original Constitution is on permanent display in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.