Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I do think there are significant positives, certainly as I discussed in terms of the mobilization and the ability of the black community to begin building permanent family structures and out of that church networks and educational networks and business communities.
These are the institutions that allow them to survive the horrors of Jim Crow.
From the distance, it's also, in fact, a very useful episode for people to think about social reform to study, to understand exactly how, where the sort of unpredictability really manifests itself, how to imagine and how much foresight we need to have to sort of game out all of the various scenarios.
The 14th Amendment is, of course, crucial to most of modern American commercial and legal life.
The promise of due process is what eventually ensures that the 1964 Civil Rights Act can stick and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
So the legal consequences, even as sort of constrained as they become by the end of Reconstruction, thanks to a conservative court, nonetheless have profound ramifications.
I mean, one of the other things
that listeners should, of course, observe is that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights are all restrictions on the freedom of government to do certain things.
It's what's called negative liberty, as philosophers frame this.
The government can't search and seize.
They can't make you testify against yourself.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments mark a profound shift towards what's called positive liberty.
They are, instead of restrictions on the state, they are grants to the state of authority to go do something.
In this case, in the case of the 14th Amendment, what it says is,
the right of due process shall not be abridged, the equal enforcement of laws, Congress, the sections two of most of those amendments are, Congress shall have the authority to enforce this legislation.
That's a positive grant to go out and ensure now that people are
existing in a world that is the United States where the laws are equally enforced.
It's a very different framing of federal authority and of how we conceptualize what liberty is.
And so those have enormous ramifications all the way up through today.
And listeners who aren't experts in legal history may not sort of remember or be aware of that distinction.
Showing 301–320 of 924 · page 16 of 47
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