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Stephen Sachs

  • A man in a blue blazer stands in front of a building on the Harvard Law School campus.

    Engaging in good faith discussion

    April 27, 2022

    Federalist Society President Jacob Richards ’22, who describes himself as a classical liberal, appreciates engaging in good faith discussion of hard issues at HLS.

  • Editing the Constitution: Let states get the ball rolling on amendments

    December 17, 2021

    An op-ed by Stephen Sachs: Our Constitution was meant to be amended, but our process for fixing it is broken. Americans haven’t proposed and ratified a new amendment for half a century — the longest gap since the Civil War. And with so few amendments, the pressure for change falls on judges, encouraging courts to get creative (and political). New amendments need a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate, a high bar in a polarized Congress. If a proposal fails that test, we never find out if three-fourths of the states would have ratified it. Lowering these thresholds might produce more amendments. But it would also produce more controversial ones, because a lower threshold lets narrower majorities rewrite our fundamental laws. Instead, we could keep the thresholds but flip their order, letting the states go first. With this alternative, a new amendment proposal could advance one state legislature at a time. Once three-fourths of states had endorsed it, working out disagreements along the way, the proposal would go to Congress for ratification. The approval of two-thirds of each chamber might then be easier to come by, with both blue and red states already having signed on.

  • Langdell Hall in the fall

    Faculty on the move

    September 1, 2021

    With the start of the academic year, a look at nine faculty who have joined Harvard Law School, been promoted, or taken on new roles in 2021.

  • Interior of United States Supreme Court

    Harvard Law School experts testify before the Presidential Commission on SCOTUS

    August 9, 2021

    As part of ongoing analysis, the 36-member Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, 16 of whom are Harvard Law School faculty or alumni, recently solicited testimony from scholars across the political spectrum to weigh in on Court reform.