Michael J. Klarman

MICHAEL J. KLARMAN is an American legal historian, and constitutional law scholar, the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School. Formerly, he was James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. He is author of The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (2016), a finalist for the 2017 George Washington Prize.

He is also author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004). He is one of the contributors to the upcoming book From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy, which has been supported by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the Institute for Southern Studies and the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. Klarman specializes in the constitutional history of race.

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Michael

Klarman

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The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, Special Issue - George Washington Prize 2017 | Vol. 62, No. 4

It is important to tell the story of the Constitution’s origins in a way that demythifies it. Impressive as they were, the men who wrote the Constitution were not demigods; they had interests, prejudices, and moral blind spots.

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