The Constitution Project seeks consensus solutions to difficult legal and constitutional issues. It does this through constructive dialogue across ideological and partisan lines, and through scholarship, activism, and public education efforts.

The Constitution Project has earned wide-ranging respect for its expertise and reports, including practical material designed to make constitutional issues a part of ordinary political debate. The media, government officials, and interested organizations frequently call on us for information, interviews, and speaking engagements. We have testified before federal and state legislative committees, and our work has been cited in numerous reports and studies by government agencies, the media, and law and policy organizations. In addition, our blue-ribbon committee members frequently write opinion pieces and are often quoted in news articles.

Initiatives

The Constitution Project has seven active initiatives, each guided by a distinguished bipartisan, blue-ribbon committee. The initiatives have produced a number of reports and other resource material that serve as excellent education tools for experts and the general public.

Our Liberty and Security Initiative, created in response to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, addresses the importance of preserving civil liberties, even as we battle new forms of terrorism. The Initiative's blue-ribbon committee includes former government officials, journalists, judges, and scholars with expertise in civil liberties and national security. The Initiative has released reports entitled Recommendations for the Use of Military Commissions; Report of the Liberty and Security Initiative on First Amendment Issues; The Creation of the United States Northern Command (NORTHCOM): An Interim Report; and Report on Post-9/11 Detentions. Others, on terrorist "watch lists" and video surveillance, are upcoming.

Our War Powers Initiative's blue-ribbon committee includes prominent academics and individuals with experience drawn from all three branches of the federal government. The Initiative seeks to provide guidance on how the U.S. should constitutionally and prudently make the decision to introduce America's armed forces into hostilities. The Initiative's report, Deciding to Use Force Abroad: War Powers in a System of Checks and Balances, makes recommendations for improving war powers decision-making and explains the problems that prompted our suggested reforms.

Our Courts Initiative conducts public education and advocacy on the importance of judicial independence, the role that judges play in protecting the rights established under the U.S. and state constitutions, and the need for our state and federal courts to remain free of political interference so that they can dispense justice fairly. The Initiative's blue-ribbon committee includes former judges and policymakers, business leaders, scholars, journalists, and law school deans. It has published a variety of material, including four task force reports on the state and federal selection processes, and budgetary and other threats to judicial independence, compiled in Uncertain Justice: Politics and America's Courts; the Independent Courts Toolbox, a CD-ROM compendium of information for local activists; the Higher Ground Standards of Conduct for Judicial Candidates; and the Newsroom Guide to Judicial Independence, designed to assist reporters who cover judicial independence issues. Other reports, including one on the impact of limits on the courts' budgets, will be released soon.

Our Death Penalty Initiative's blue-ribbon committee includes both prominent supporters and opponents of the death penalty who are united in their profound concern that, in recent years, and around the country, procedural safeguards and other assurances of fundamental fairness in the administration of capital punishment are deeply flawed. The committee's initial consensus recommendations for reform are contained in// Mandatory Justice: Eighteen Reforms to the Death Penalty (July 2001)//. The Committee has recently updated its report with /Mandatory Justice: The Death Penalty Revisited (February 2006),/ taking a look at recent progress and still-needed reforms in capital punishment systems in the United States.

Our Constitutional Amendments Initiative's blue-ribbon committee was created to examine the process by which the U.S. Constitution is amended. The committee drew on the considerable legal expertise of its members and on documents from the earliest days of our Republic to create a set of eight guidelines for amending the Constitution and to urge that the Constitution be amended only with the utmost care, and in a manner consistent with the spirit and meaning of the entire document. The guidelines and accompanying commentary are contained in "Great and Extraordinary Occasions": Developing Guidelines for Constitutional Change.

Our Right to Counsel Initiative, in partnership with the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, marked the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright by establishing a national, bipartisan committee to review the indigent defense system throughout the nation, and to create consensus recommendations for any necessary reforms. The committee's work is being informed by new nationwide research, conducted by scholars with expertise in social sciences and criminal justice, and by previous research. The Initiative's report will be released later this year.

Our Sentencing Initiative was formed in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Blakely v. Washington, which called into question the constitutionality of sentencing systems nationwide and led to the Court's subsequent decision in U.S. v. Booker that the federal guidelines must no longer be mandatory. The Initiative convened a small working group of experts, including current and former state and federal prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, policymakers, and scholars, to examine the implications of the Court's decisions and determine how best to amend sentencing laws to comply with the new constitutional rule. The Initiative has also acted as a convener for judges, legislators, litigators, scholars, and various criminal justice advocacy and policy organizations concerned about the future of criminal sentencing.

Public Education

In addition to our consensus recommendations and reports, the Constitution Project sponsors events and panels on controversial legal issues of the day. For example:

In May 2005, the Liberty and Security Initiative held a press conference to announce the release of a statement calling on the Bush administration and Congress to create a bipartisan commission, modeled after the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the issue of abuse of terrorist suspects at detention facilities. In April 2005, the Initiative held a forum on the issue of extraordinary rendition. Panelists discussed the practice's legal and policy implications, including when it may be legitimate and what the limits should be. In July 2004, the Initiative held a panel discussion on the Supreme Court's decisions in the Rasul (Guantanamo), Hamdi, and Padilla detention cases. Panelists included lawyers representing the detainees as well as distinguished legal experts. In December 2003, the Initiative co-sponsored a panel discussion on liberty and security with the Federalist Society, which featured opening remarks by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

In March 2005, the Sentencing Initiative co-sponsored an event with the American Constitution Society focusing on federal judges' reactions to the Booker decision. We also co-sponsored, with the Vera Institute of Justice, a congressional staff briefing in January 2005 to discuss the advantages that sentencing systems like those in various states have over the federal system, and to urge that policymakers study these systems before making any decisions on federal legislation to respond to Booker.

In January 2005, Death Penalty Initiative member Scott Turow provided written testimony, along with autographed copies of his non-fiction book, Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty, to a New York State Assembly committee investigating the death penalty. Initiative Co-Chair Gerald Kogan testified in person before the committee. In October 2003, we held a discussion by Mr. Turow and a book-signing for the release of Ultimate Punishment. The Initiative, along with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, sponsored a performance of the acclaimed play, "The Exonerated," in January 2003, followed by remarks by former Attorney General Janet Reno and a panel of exonerated death row inmates.

Amicus Briefs

The Constitution Project files amicus curiae briefs in important court cases urging adoption of its consensus reforms. Our briefs have been influential in many of these cases. For example, the Death Penalty Initiative filed a brief in Roper v. Simmons urging the Supreme Court to abolish the juvenile death penalty, which it did in March 2005. In Banks v. Dretke (2004), Death Penalty Initiative members William S. Sessions, former FBI Director and federal judge, and John J. Gibbons, former chief of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, filed a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Mr. Banks's claims of prosecutorial misconduct and ineffectiveness of defense counsel. After the Court stayed the execution 10 minutes before it was to occur, Judges Sessions and Gibbons participated in another brief urging that his conviction and sentence be overturned. In a major victory, the Court overturned Banks's sentence and sent his conviction back to the lower court for further review. In Wiggins v. Smith (2003), the Project's brief successfully urged the Supreme Court to overturn a death row inmate's sentence because his lawyer presented no mitigating evidence.

The Project organized and assisted in the preparation of a brief of several diverse organizations in the case of Padilla v. Rumsfeld before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. The briefs argued that there is no constitutional justification for the detention of Padilla, an American citizen arrested on U.S. soil, as an "enemy combatant." The Second Circuit ruled in Padilla's favor, and the Supreme Court remanded the case to the district court in South Carolina, which ruled in February 2005 that the U.S. government may not continue to hold Padilla without charging him with a crime. In addition, we assisted in the preparation of amicus briefs in the Hamdi and Rasul detainee cases. In June 2004, the Court issued favorable rulings in both cases.