“Professor Roosevelt has written a fascinating book in which he re-examines our standard founding story, and what that has meant to the evolution of our law and society,” said Patricia Proctor, founding director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy. “He concludes that the origin story most often told about a fundamental value of equality being reflected in the Declaration and Constitution is not correct, while offering an alternative explanation about how modern American values regarding equality actually emerged in American history and why this matters.”
Roosevelt is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School. He is a former law clerk to retired Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. His many achievements and recognitions include being appointed as a member of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States established in 2021. He is the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.
In addition to The Nation that Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, his book for which the lecture is named, he is the author of several scholarly books including The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions, as well as many law review articles and two novels. He is a frequent media commentator and writer on issues pertaining to the Supreme Court and related matters. His articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Glove, TIME, and Newsweek.
The lecture is sponsored by Marshall’s Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council and is free and open to the public. For more information contact Proctor by e-mail at patricia.proctor@marshall.edu.