Why is the concept of one people the most audacious provocation of America?

So think about the difficulty of carrying out any enterprise, right? Whatever it is that you want to do, all right? And the idea of doing it as a collective action.

So within a family, choosing a restaurant, right? Sometimes those mundane tasks sort of reveal the difficulty of collective action because everybody has a different view, everybody has different preferences, and we're all wedded to those preferences, right? And then we can escalate the task to greater levels of difficulty.

So restaurant to vacation to moving, right? W- Right? Assuming that the whole family has a choice and a say, right? So we can...

And then go beyond the family to a workplace.

Go beyond a workplace to, to local governance.

Go beyond that to a house of worship, right? So making a set of collective choices in whatever unit, whether small, medium, or extremely large, is extremely difficult.

Why do you believe that?

So why in this moment in our society did you both feel it was necessary to write this and collect this book of essays? Guy, we'll start with you.

Sure.

I mean, I think this moment, 250th, is a moment of reflection for the country.

But it is also a time period, given what is going on in our politics and what is going on around the world.

to look inward and to ask ourselves the role that law has played, both positively and negatively, in American governance.

This is something that we have to justify to our students.

This is something we have to justify to ourselves.

But first, Professor Charles, say a word about the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute and the work you continue to do there, sir.

Well, thank you for the opportunity.

Let me just start with actually where you would like to start, because I think your intuitions about what is going on is correct and very much related to the work of the Institute.

We have to begin with an understanding that for the last, I don't know, 50 or 60 years since the 1960s, as a result of the civil rights movement, we in this country have had a civil rights paradigm.

And at the heart of the civil rights paradigm has been at least a nominal commitment to black equality and freedom.

And related to that is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Housing Act of 1968.

So a set of core civil rights statutes that have attempted to address the problem of racial discrimination, racial subordination, anti-Black racism that stems from slavery through Jim Crow, and then through the modern era.

Professor Charles, take it away.