Jill Lepore with Jamal Greene: We the People | LIVE from NYPL

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Examine the past—and potential future—of the U.S. Constitution with the beloved American historian. For event details and more, visit https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2025/09/29/jill-lepore READ THE BOOK NYPL Catalog: https://borrow.nypl.org/search/card?id=71331ddf-4e94-5513-a597-c7029c8484fd&entityType=FormatGroup The Library Shop — proceeds benefit The New York Public Library: https://shop.nypl.org/collections/events-books/products/we-the-people-a-history-of-the-u-s-constitution LIVE FROM NYPL Upcoming Events: https://nypl.org/live Sign up for our newsletters: https://pages.email.nypl.org/updates The United States Constitution is one of the oldest in the world, and it is also one of the most difficult to amend. On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, Jill Lepore’s We the People reexamines this foundational text not as a static artifact but as a living document shaped—and too often stalled—by the will of the people. Drawing on research from the Amendments Project—a searchable archive of all the proposed amendments to the Constitution from 1789 to the present—Lepore traces more than two centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to amend a document designed both to resist change and to permit it through peaceful, democratic means. Lepore and legal scholar Jamal Greene examine how the amendment process lies at the heart of American constitutionalism—and how the public and lawmakers might take it up once again. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jamal Greene is a constitutional law expert whose scholarship focuses on the structure of legal and constitutional argument. He teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, the law of the political process, First Amendment, and federal courts. From January 2023 to December 2024, Greene served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. Greene is the author of the book How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart (HMH, March 2021). He is also the author of numerous law review articles and has written in-depth about the Supreme Court, constitutional rights adjudication, and the constitutional theory of originalism. The New York Public Library welcomes your comments and invites you to participate in conversations on NYPL social media platforms. To make the experience better for all of our social media followers, we ask that you keep your comments relevant to the original post. Off-topic comments may be removed to ensure that the conversation remains productive.