Utah Valley University’s Center for Constitutional Studies will hold its annual Constitution Day conference on UVU’s Orem Campus Thursday – Friday, Sept. 14 – 15, 2023, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday and from 8:45 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Friday.
The theme of the one-day conference is “Framing the Frontier: The Making of Western-State Constitutions.” It centers around the impact of state constitutions in the West and their broader influence on our constitutional tradition in America.
The conference will feature esteemed constitutional scholars from the U.S. and the U.K. who will present and lead panel discussions on topics such as state constitutions and the courts, formal processes of state constitutional change, political conflict and state constitutional change, and why state constitutions matter.
Among the presenters are Dr. John Dinan, Wake Forest University, a leading expert on state constitutions, and Dr. Nicholas Cole, Oxford University, who founded The Quill Project, a platform that has digitized the records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and modeled how the negotiations unfolded.
Keynoting the conference on Friday, Sept. 15, is the Honorable Jeffrey S. Sutton, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, who will speak on the topic of “Why State Constitutions Matter.”
“Recent Supreme Court decisions have remanded a number of constitutional questions back to the states,” said Dr. Matthew Brogdon, senior director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at UVU, “and there is a critical need for dialogue about and understanding of the relationship between federal and state constitutions. This conference will be an important forum for advancing that discussion.”
