Constitution Day 2026: The Courage to Imagine—and the Work That Follows

I have written many Constitution Day posts over the years. I have written about the establishment of justice and the rule of law, and the responsibility each of us carries to preserve our democracy. This year, as our nation marks its 250th anniversary, I decided to begin somewhere different. I sat down with an AP Government student and asked what the Constitution means to them today.

Our conversation ranged far and wide. We talked about the intent behind the Constitution and the system of government it created. We talked about the ways our justice system has lived up to its promises—and the many ways it has not. We talked about the realities of our founding, including both the limitations of what the founders created and the profound failures to extend the rights and freedoms they articulated to all people. We talked about whether, despite all of those contradictions and challenges, the Constitution can continue to offer hope and promise for the future.

One takeaway from that conversation has stayed with me: the vision required to create something new.

There is much about our founding that deserves scrutiny, and much about the original Constitution that has required generations of Americans to change, expand, and improve. But there is also something worth remembering about the act of imagining a new system of government in the first place.

At a pivotal moment, people with deeply different perspectives came together and asked fundamental questions about what government could and should be. They debated. They disagreed. They compromised. They wrestled with difficult questions about how power should be structured, constrained, and balanced. And ultimately, they took ideas about a better future and put pen to paper.

The Constitution was not simply an expression of ideals. It was an attempt to turn a vision into a plan. That feels particularly meaningful to me this Constitution Day.

We are living through another period of enormous change. Technology is transforming how we live and work. Trust in institutions is strained. Our courts and legal system face significant challenges, including an access to justice crisis that leaves millions of people unable to fairly resolve their legal problems. Our democracy and rule of law face pressures that demand our attention and our action.

It would be easy in such a moment to focus only on preserving what we have. Preservation matters enormously. The constitutional framework of checks and balances, individual rights, judicial independence, and the rule of law remain essential to our democracy. But our history also reminds us that preserving our system does not mean standing still.

A commitment to our constitutional ideals also requires us to ask how our institutions can better fulfill them.

That question is central to our work at IAALS. For 20 years, we have worked with partners across the country to improve our justice system, grounded in the belief that it can—and must—work better for everyone. As we enter our third decade, we are asking an even bigger question: what should our justice system look like in the future, and what will it take to get there?

Answering that question requires more than identifying what is wrong with the system we have today. It requires vision. It requires creativity. It requires bringing together people with different experiences and perspectives. It requires the willingness to challenge assumptions, wrestle with difficult choices, and imagine what is possible. And, critically, it requires doing the hard work of turning those ideas into action.

In that sense, there is something powerful to learn from the work of our founding—not because the founders got everything right, but because they understood that institutions are created by people willing to envision something better and then undertake the difficult work of building it.

Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, that work belongs to us.

Across the country this Constitution Day, students, educators, judges, lawyers, civic leaders, and community members will gather for conversations about our founding and our future, including here at the University of Denver. What an extraordinary opportunity this anniversary gives us—not simply to look backwards at what was created, but to look forward and ask what we are called to create now.

I feel particularly lucky to have started that conversation with a Hamilton-loving AP Government student who sees the shortcomings and contradictions of our founding clearly, yet still finds inspiration in the audacity of imagining something better.

There is hope in that. There is also a challenge for all of us.

May we seek out conversations across generations and perspectives. May we remain clear-eyed about where our institutions fall short while refusing to lose sight of what they can become. And may we have the same willingness to imagine, to engage, to do the hard work, and ultimately to put pen to paper—and vision into action.