Nationally recognized experts analyze how states deal with major constitutional issues.

Professor Robert Hazell will discuss his report on the Conservative plans for constitutional reform, which will be published in February. Their agenda is greater than is generally supposed. The highlights of the Conservative plans include repealling the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a British bill of rights; to reduce the size of the House of Commons by 10 per cent; and to pass legislation requiring a national referendum for future EU Treaties backed up by a Sovereignty Bill to ensure that utimate authority stays at Westminster.

The text also covers longer-term measures and objectives under consideration, such as: proportional representation; modernization of the monarchy; English regional assemblies; accountability in national security; reform of the judiciary and legal system; a home-grown Bill of Rights; and extending democracy within the institutions of the European Union.

Nationally recognized experts analyze how states deal with major constitutional issues.

Nationally recognized experts analyze how states deal with major constitutional issues.

From 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, until the present, Congress enacted hardly any major legislation outside of the tax law President Trump signed in 2017. In the same period, the Supreme Court dismantled much of America's campaign finance law, severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, permitted states to opt-out of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, weakened laws protecting against age discimination and sexual and racial harassment, and held that every state must permit same-sex couples to marry. This powerful unelected body, now controlled by six very conservative Republicans, has and will become the locus of policymaking in the United States. Ian Millhiser, Vox's Supreme Court correspondent, tells the story of what those six justices are likely to do with their power. It is true that the right to abortion is in its final days, as is affirmative action. But Millhiser shows that it is in the most arcane decisions that the Court will fundamentally reshape America, transforming it into something far less democratic, by attacking voting rights, dismantling and vetoing the federal administrative state, ignoring the separation of church and state, and putting corporations above the law. The Agenda exposes a radically altered Supreme Court whose powers extend far beyond transforming any individual right--its agenda is to shape the very nature of America's government, redefining who gets to have legal rights, who is beyond the reach of the law, and who chooses the people who make our laws.