Is America Unfinished or Just Getting Started? Alexandra Natapoff on 250 Years of Justice and Injustice in the United States

About this episode

The episode discusses the complexities of America's history of justice and injustice as it approaches its 250th birthday.

“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.” — Alexandra Natapoff It’s less than six weeks until America’s 250th birthday. The official America 250 store is selling T-shirts while Harvard Law School is doing something slightly less commercial. 62 HLS professors have written 1,000-word essays, assembled into a single volume to be published on July 4. Entitled America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance , it’s co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff , a Harvard Law professor who spent years as a federal public defender in Baltimore. The title, of course, is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died in the Civil War. So is America unfinished or is it just getting started? For Natapoff and other Harvard Law School professors like this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Jill Lepore, the answer is suitably complex. Yes and no and maybe. Everything all at once. The essays…

People in this episode

Host: Andrew Keen

Guest: Alexandra Natapoff

Topics covered

• justice
• injustice
• democracy
• capitalism
• American history
• law
• governance

Keywords

• democracy
• justice
• injustice
• capitalism
• American history
• Harvard Law
• Lincoln
• essays

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard Law School

Books & works: America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance

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