At 250: A Constitution Still Being Claimed
July 2026
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I sit here, struggling to find the words to write about the United States’ semiquincentennial and reconcile what it means to commemorate 250 years of a nation that, at its founding, did not imagine someone like me as part of its constitutional project.
That is the first tension this issue asks us to hold: commemoration and reckoning.
What does it mean to celebrate a country whose founding documents spoke of liberty while tolerating enslavement, colonization, exclusion, and dispossession? Can we honor a constitutional tradition that has inspired movements for freedom, while also admitting that the original promise of that tradition was never extended equally? Is it possible to love this country and its potential without pretending that its history has been just?
More personally: am I the sum of my ancestors’ hopes and dreams, carrying forward the work they made possible? Or am I a cog in a machine I am supposed to be helping dismantle?
But you did not come here for my existential crisis. Or maybe, in some way, you did. Because this special edition is not an invitation to celebrate uncritically. It is an invitation to tell the truth. To commemorate 250 years of the United States honestly is not to pretend the founding was complete, fair, or equally liberatory. It is to honor the people who refused to let the founding be the final word.
My hope for everyone reading this issue is that you feel moved, challenged, validated, informed, and inspired. I hope you find in these pages not a simple celebration, but a meaningful reckoning. I hope you are reminded that the rule of law is not an abstract phrase reserved for courtrooms, law review articles, or ceremonial speeches. It is a promise—and too often, an unfulfilled one.
That brings us to the second tension: a nation of laws is not immune to injustice.
To whom does the rule of law apply? It’s an important question to ask, because our lofty legal ideals sound very different to those who have never had to fight to be recognized by the law. The importance of the law means something different to those who have lived with the knowledge that what is “legal” has not always been just. “The rule of law” carries a different connotation to people whose communities have been criminalized, excluded, displaced, and denied dignity under the guise of legality.
We know this from our own history. Enslavement was legal. Indigenous dispossession was carried out through law. Segregation was enforced by law. Systems that claim the authority of law have separated families, exploited workers, targeted queer and trans people, excluded immigrants, and punished the poor. Legality alone cannot be our north star, because legality has too often been used to protect power rather than people.
And yet, the story does not end there.
It is true that the American legal system has never been perfect. This nation has always been an experiment—one built with the ink and intent of slaveholders, colonizers, and men who imagined liberty narrowly. But people fought. People organized. People imagined more. People forced this country to confront the gap between its stated ideals and its lived realities. People pushed the law closer to justice, often at great personal risk.
That is what this edition honors. Not the myth that the law has always been just. But the truth that people have always labored to make it so.
The law is not a neutral, self-correcting force. It often reflects the power of those who control it. In this moment in history, we cannot settle for restoring a broken status quo. Longing for a return to what already failed so many people will not free us. The law that got us here, standing alone, will not get us out. But law in the hands of people committed to justice can be a tool of resistance, repair, and reconstruction.
And that brings us to the third tension: lawyers as maintainers or builders.
As lawyers, we are trained to work within systems. We interpret rules, preserve records, defend processes, advise clients, and navigate institutions. This is important work, but if we stop there, we risk becoming caretakers of injustice simply because it has been formalized. We risk mistaking procedure for fairness, order for justice, and legality for legitimacy.
Charles Hamilton Houston famously warned that a lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society. That framing is, and should be, uncomfortable. It forces us to ask whether we are using our training merely to maintain the machinery of power, or whether we are helping design something more humane.
The Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct do not describe lawyers as only private representatives of clients. The Preamble states that a lawyer is also “a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.” That responsibility is not passive. It is not ceremonial. It is not satisfied by admiring the rule of law in theory while remaining silent when it is undermined in practice.
As lawyers, we must be both guardians and visionaries. Guardians of fragile rights constantly under threat. Visionaries who can see beyond this moment to what justice could look like when it truly belongs to all of us.
As you read through this issue, you will encounter all three of these tensions. You will read pieces that ask what it means to commemorate a nation whose promises have always been contested. You will see how the language of law has been used to both justify exclusion and demand liberation. You will encounter people across the legal profession wrestling with what it means to defend the rule of law without confusing defense with complacency.
This is not theoretical work.
The threats to the rule of law are not abstract. They are happening now. Courts are facing political pressure. Judges are being attacked for doing their jobs. Lawyers and legal organizations are suffering retaliation for representing unpopular clients, defending vulnerable communities, or challenging government power. Immigrants, transgender people, communities of color, protestors, workers, and poor people are again being positioned as threats to justify expanded state power.
These are not ordinary disagreements about policy. They are tests of whether the system itself holds. Because if the law can be broken from the top without consequence, then no rights are safe at the bottom.
That is why this edition matters. Not because it offers easy answers or asks us to celebrate uncritically. But because it gathers voices willing to tell the truth: that the rule of law is both fragile and necessary; that it has been used to harm and can be used to protect; that it is not self-executing; and that it depends on people willing to defend, challenge, and remake it.
If there is one thing we know, it is that the rule of law is not defended in a single moment. It is defended through sustained action. Through the choices we make in our work, in our communities, in our institutions, and in the way we show up when doing so is difficult.
And you are needed in that work.
To defend what we have, and build what is still needed, and to not settle for the law as it is, when justice demands the law as it should be.
Standing at this crossroads of work of the last 250 years and where we go next, we shall carry this work forward—toward dignity, toward freedom, and toward a legal system worthy of us all.
Explore This Issue
The American Dream and the Rule of Law
Rule of Law
By Russell Carparelli
