School of Public Policy to Host 2017 Constitution Day Lecture

The 2017 School of Public Policy Constitution Day lecture, “The Constitutionalism of John Adams,” will take place at Wilburn Auditorium at Drescher Graduate Campus in Malibu on Tuesday, September 19, at noon.

Darren Staloff, professor of early American history at The City College of New York, will serve as this year’s special guest speaker. He will examine the constitutional teachings of John Adams.

Adams was the first of the nation’s constitutional statesmen to articulate the various procedures and arrangements that have come to characterize American constitutionalism. What lay behind his thinking was a careful examination of human history and psychology. The results of his research was a search for a dynamic equilibrium within the American regime, one predicated based on ongoing partisan and social conflict that would insure republican liberty and the rule of law.

Staloff teaches courses in colonial and revolutionary America. He has published The Making of the American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (Oxford University Press) and Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (Hill and Wang). He has recorded dozens of audio and video tapes (nationally distributed) on US history, world history, and major philosophers. Staloff has received many fellowships, including The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a post-doctoral fellowship from the Omahundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

This lecture is free to attend, and registration is required. For additional information, visit the School of Public Policy website.