Nearly 250 years after its adoption, the Declaration of Independence remains one of America’s most revered—and most disputed—texts. In Declaration at 250, Stanford Law’s Constitutional Law Center and Stanford Legal bring together leading scholars, historians, and jurists from across the ideological spectrum to ask a single urgent question: What does the Declaration mean for Americans today? Introduced by Professor Michael McConnell, the series explores the conditions that sustain democratic self-government, confronts modern criticisms of the founding, and considers whether the Declaration implies not only rights but duties. Across eight conversations, it examines the Declaration’s influence on state constitutions, its structural ideas about government, whether it has legal force, how its principles translate to emerging challenges like artificial intelligence, and whether it still serves—as Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. argued—as America’s enduring promissory note to the future.
