The first 13 of the AEI Walter Berns Constitution Day Lectures are now collected in one volume. Given by distinguished scholars, judges, and political figures—and edited by AEI Senior Fellow Gary J. Schmitt—the lectures cover a host of topics providing a deeper understanding of the US constitutional order and its underlying principles. The volume also reissues a 2011 panel discussion by Christopher DeMuth, Leon R. Kass, and Jeremy A. Rabkin honoring longtime AEI colleague Walter Berns’s still relevant and important scholarship on the Constitution and the American republic.

How can we reconcile competing claims about artificial intelligence in today’s policy debate? Will AI herald a technological utopia filled with scientific breakthroughs that extend and enhance life, or will the machines we create turn on us and usher in the apocalypse? Will chatbots stifle creativity and crush the human spirit, or are they just reflections of ourselves, for better or worse? As we grapple with these questions, technologists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, writers, artists, and elected officials have espoused approaches to AI advances that appear fundamentally at odds with each other.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the nation’s founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance.

In the fifth volume of this series, legal scholars and political scientists discuss how the American Revolution both perpetuated slavery and created the conditions for its abolition. While hundreds of thousands of African Americans remained enslaved at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of human equality galvanized slavery’s opponents and laid the groundwork for increasingly egalitarian definitions of American citizenship.

Considering how the Declaration shaped antislavery thinkers and politicians such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and informed the 14th Amendment demonstrates how the American Revolution enabled a “new birth of freedom” in the 19th century.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. 

The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. In the fourth volume of this series, legal scholars and political scientists examine the many ways in which the founding generation understood the “unalienable rights” immortalized by the Declaration of Independence.

Although the Declaration described the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a “self-evident” truth, this characterization belied the Revolutionary era’s complex discourse on the origins of political rights and their role in sustaining a political community.

Delving into these debates reveals how the American Revolution encoded a productive tension between individual rights and communal responsibilities at the nation’s founding.

Material hardship among American children has never been lower. This seeming victory in the War on Poverty, however, has failed to loosen the connection between family origins and where kids end up. Children born to the most disadvantaged parents today are no less likely than in the past to become the most disadvantaged adults when they grow up. Indeed, because of the perverse disincentives in our safety net, policy may have simultaneously reduced hardship while impeding upward mobility. More generally, the progressive assumption that what poor children need to advance primarily involves more money is a dubious one.

But if progressive proposals to expand the opportunities of poor kids have disappointed, the challenges those children and adolescents face have never sufficiently preoccupied the right. Conservatives are appropriately skeptical of government’s ability to influence behaviors and values or to manage initiatives effectively. Their concerns about the federal government’s proper role in social policy are well-grounded. But the moral imperative to do right by kids—to affirm the American Dream—remains.

This volume provides a set of ideas to do just that. The proposals are grounded in the insight that greater opportunity requires shoring up the relationships of children and adolescents and the strength of the institutions to which they are connected—in short, rebuilding social capital. And they embrace a spirit of innovation. Expanding opportunity requires experimentation with new approaches, many of which will fail, to identify scalable effective policies. But identify them we must.