Welcome

The following is a transcript of the “Welcome” panel, which took place at Thorne Auditorium, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Chicago, Illinois, on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, as part of the symposium, The Power of State Constitutional Rights. The transcript is edited for clarity. 

Speakers:

• Zachary Clopton, Interim Dean, Daniel Hale Williams Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
• May Hiatt, Editor-in-Chief, Northwestern University Law Review
• Michael Waldman, President and CEO, Brennan Center for Justice

Kathrina (Kasia) Szymborski Wolfkot: Welcome to our two-day state con law extravaganza: The Power of State Constitutional Rights. My name is Kasia Wolfkot. I am senior counsel at the Brennan Center where I focus on, surprise, state courts and state constitutions.

A few housekeeping notes: bathrooms are to the left of the vending machines at the end of the hallway. There is Illinois CLE credit available for in-person attendees. You can go to the registration desk to get the link. And you can text questions during the panels to the following phone number: 201–528–3781. And we are happy to repeat that throughout. Again, if you have any questions during the panels, text them to the following phone number: 201–528–3781.

Now I will turn things over to Zach Clopton, the interim dean of Northwestern Law School, May Hiatt, the editor-in-chief of the Northwestern Law Review, and Michael Waldman, the president and CEO of the Brennan Center.

Zach Clopton: Good morning. I’m so pleased to welcome you all to Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. I’m Zach Clopton, the dean of the law school here. And I’m also pulling double duty as a faculty sponsor of this event.

A big part of my job is telling people how excited I am that they’ve come to Northwestern. But I can let you in on a little secret that I really mean it today. Because, as I said, I’m a co-sponsor of this event. I’m someone who cares deeply about the issues we’re talking about today. And I will put my professor hat back on and moderate a panel tomorrow.

You’re joining us at a very exciting time at Northwestern Law School. We had more applications to join our JD class than we’ve ever had in the school’s history. We have the best academic credentials in our incoming class that we’ve ever had. We are number one in job placements in Big Law and placing students in amazing opportunities in public interest, in government, and in clerkships.

This is also an important time to be talking about issues related to state law, state constitutional rights, and state courts. I think I don’t have to tell any of you about the things going on in our wider world, indeed, things going on in our city. And so being able to talk about these issues here in Chicago on a day like today, I think, is more important than ever.

Before we begin the events, I do want to give a few thank yous to folks who made today’s event happen. First from the Northwestern University law review, special thanks to May Hiatt, the editor-in-chief, Lily Pieper, senior symposium editor, and Giselle Goad, the symposium editor.

We also want to thank our partners at the Brennan Center, especially Alicia Bannon, Susan Augenbraun, Terrence Francois, and Jamie Muth. I want to give a thank you to my friend and co-sponsor of this event, Professor Dan Rodriguez, and to the so many people here at Northwestern Law who have made this event possible, who provided breakfast, our great space, and the great events you’re going to see over the next two days.

It’s been a pleasure working with the law review and the Brennan Center on putting this together, and I am confident you will enjoy and learn a lot from the next two days. So thank you again for joining us, I’m really excited for the program, and I’m going to turn things over to May Hiatt.

May Hiatt: Good morning, everybody. My name is May Hiatt. I’m the editor-in-chief of the Northwestern University Law Review, and along with Dean Clopton and Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to today’s symposium on the power of state constitutional rights.

Symposia are very special events. I think they’re very distinct from trade conferences or guest lectures at a law school. Their sole purpose is the free intercourse of ideas. There’s no one legal question or one individual that dominates. In some sense, they’re quite indulgent exercises, just thoughtful discourse for its own sake.

I’ve no doubt that many great essays will be produced from the discussions we have today, and the arguments contained in those essays will go on to have a life of their own in litigation and policymaking. But as for today and tomorrow, I’m just very excited to witness the pure, time-honored act of scholars and practitioners coming together to wrestle with difficult and important questions.

Today’s symposium focuses on the power of state constitutional rights. And I think it’s a particularly timely topic. We’re at a moment in our nation’s history where the role of states in protecting individual rights has never been more important. As the Supreme Court has pulled back on federal constitutional protections in areas like reproductive rights, voting rights, and criminal justice, state constitutions have emerged as crucial alternative sources of rights protection.

State constitutions often provide more explicit and expansive protections than the U.S. Constitution. They’re more frequently amended, more detailed, and more responsive to the needs of their communities. And yet, they remain understudied and underutilized in legal scholarship and practice. This symposium brings together some of the nation’s leading experts to explore how we can better harness the power of these documents to protect individual rights and promote justice.

Over the next two days, we’ll hear from judges, practitioners, and scholars who will share their insights on topics ranging from reproductive rights to education to criminal justice reform. We’ll explore how state constitutional interpretation differs from federal interpretation, how advocates can more effectively use state constitutions in litigation, and what the future holds for state constitutional law.

I want to thank everyone who made this event possible. First and foremost, our incredible speakers and panelists who have traveled from across the country to be here. I also want to thank the Brennan Center for Justice, our co-sponsor, and particularly Alicia Bannon, Kasia Wolfkot, Susan Augenbraun, Terrence Francois, and Jamie Muth for their partnership in organizing this event.

From the law review, I want to thank our symposium editors, Lily Pieper and Giselle Goad, who have worked tirelessly to make this event a reality. I also want to thank Dean Clopton and Professor Rodriguez for their support and sponsorship. And finally, I want to thank the Northwestern Law School staff, particularly Sebastian Bujak and the facilities team, for making this beautiful venue possible.

Before I turn it over to Michael Waldman, I just want to say how honored I am to be here today. As a law student, I’m constantly reminded that the law is not static. It evolves, it grows, and it responds to the needs of the moment. Events like this are where that evolution happens. Where new ideas are born, where old assumptions are challenged, and where the future of the law is shaped. So thank you all for being here to be part of that process. And now, I’m pleased to turn it over to Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice.

Michael Waldman: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here with all of you. And I want to thank Northwestern, the law review, and especially Dean Clopton and Professor Rodriguez for hosting us. The Brennan Center is thrilled to be part of this conversation. This is a topic that is very close to our hearts and central to our work.

The Brennan Center was founded 30 years ago with a mission to advance the values of democracy and justice. And from the very beginning, we’ve recognized that state constitutions and state courts play a vital role in protecting rights and advancing justice. In fact, one of our first major projects was creating a database of state constitutional equal rights provisions. It’s something that my colleagues work on to keep up to date as a watering hole for people all across the country wrestling with these issues to talk to each other.

In part, because there are so many commonalities in what we see in state constitutions. There’s a growing and great recognition that the states play and can play even more so a vital role at a time like this in our country. And that state constitutions and state courts are an independent source for protection of rights, whether it’s property rights, individual rights, criminal justice, gun rights, all the different kinds of ways in which we know that state constitutions speak out, often much more explicitly than the U.S. Constitution does.

We work, as you may know at the Brennan Center, quite a bit to strengthen our democracy and protect voting rights. And I am endlessly struck by the fact that 49 of the 50 states have more explicit protection for the right to vote in the state constitutions than the U.S. Constitution does, as just one example.

We have an opportunity in understanding federalism and in understanding these charters of freedom in all the different states to do what Abraham Lincoln urged us to do, which was to disenthrall ourselves and think anew. And that’s really what this conversation and this conference is about.

We are really honored to have so many leading practitioners, scholars, and advocates. I’ll note that this is, from the Brennan Center’s perspective, not really a new topic in the following sense as well. Many of you perhaps know that the Brennan Center was started 30 years ago by the clerks and family of the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan after he left the court.

And I was a law student back in an earlier century at NYU and was thrilled to hear that Justice Brennan, still on the bench, would be coming to deliver a major lecture at the law school. And I didn’t know what he was going to talk about. Was this going to be, you know, New York Times v. Sullivan or the Warren court? And I was surprised when he said: “The topic I want to talk about is the vital role of state constitutions and state courts,” and urging people then who were so enthralled to the activism of the Supreme Court of that era, to take special attention and pay special attention to all of these documents and the systems that they anchored.

He said that day, he said, “The legal revolution, which has brought federal law to the fore, must not be allowed to inhibit the independent protective force of state law. For, without it, the full realization of our liberties,” Justice Brennan said, “cannot be guaranteed.” So there’s a long provenance to this that we are honored to be part of.

I want to, before I turn it over to our first speakers, join in the chorus of thanks. There’s some repetitiveness, but you can’t say thank you too often. So we certainly do want to thank the Northwestern Law Review, to May Hiatt, Lily Pieper, and Giselle Goad. Of course the faculty sponsors, the dean and Professor Daniel Rodriguez who we’re about to hear from, who did so much to bring this to Northwestern.

Northwestern staff, including Sebastian Bujak and the whole facility staff and many, many of my colleagues from the Brennan Center. We’ve mentioned a few: Susan Augenbraun, Terrence Francois, Jamie Muth, and the folks in the initiative on state courts, our judiciary program led by Alicia Bannon. And you will hear from a number of them during the course of the next two days.

And to our colleagues at NYU School of Law, Dean Troy McKenzie and others, who’ve been so encouraging of us. I’m excited. I think this is going to be something that really helps us widen our minds about what is possible. And, to that end, the first conversation we’ll have will be with really a special speaker.

Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit is one of the visionaries on this subject, the author of an esteemed book on state constitutions, an ardent voice for taking seriously what these documents mean, and a leader in the federal judiciary and in the legal world on this. And we’re really honored to have Judge Sutton here, and he will be in conversation with Professor Daniel Rodriguez, the Harold Washington Professor here at Northwestern. So please join me in welcoming them to the stage, and thank you all again for being here.