S2 E1 American Sovereigns with Christian Fritz

Welcome back to the second season of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America Podcast, a series of conversations with America's top scholars, writers, journalists, and activists, on the topic of our Constitution. Thank you for tuning in to this podcast, and for your time, support, and continued interest in a subject that I personally find to be the most crucial topic of our time. Season one was an amazing journey for me, and I would sum it up like this: Americans, for the first time in human history, established the inalienable right of the people to not only create their forms of government but to change and to alter them, whenever they deemed necessary. By now, that mantra may sound familiar to everyone, even in today's muddied political climate. But just how is this fundamental, unshakeable right exercised? What precedents from our founding period define our role as sovereign citizens? And what lessons can we take away from those revolutionary Americans who set the United States on its unique and presumably, enlightened and democratic path? Christian Fritz joined the UNM law faculty in 1987 to introduce legal history to first-year students, a new concept to legal education. Even today, few law schools offer such a course. Fritz had just become the first person to complete a program at the University of California in which he earned a Ph.D. in history at Berkeley along with a law degree from Hastings College of Law. At the UNM law school, he teaches a variety of legal history courses along with Property. He has a deep knowledge of legal and constitutional history and an exhaustive research style. In addition to numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews, Fritz has written books on legal history, including Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851-1891. In October 2007, Cambridge University Press published his long-term study: American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War.

This seminal work challenges traditional American constitutional history, theory, and jurisprudence that sees today’s constitutionalism as linked by an unbroken chain to the 1787 Federal constitutional convention. It examines the idea that after the American Revolution, a collectivity – the people – would rule as the sovereign. Heated political controversies within the states and at the national level over what it meant for the people to be the sovereign, and how that collective sovereign could express its will were not resolved prior to the Civil War. The idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Today’s constitutionalism is not a natural inheritance, but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about themselves as a collective sovereign. Its the perfect topic to begin this season with because until we have a deeper understanding of our relationship to our constitution, it will be difficult for Americans to be engaged in any process of remaking it. So, let's dig in!

Chris, welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America Podcast!