The Future of US Democracy The Constitution of the Criminal State

This talk will investigate how citizens in a constitutional democracy should think about abuses of authority and violations of the public trust on the part of government officials—in short, how they should think about state criminality. Scholars of constitutionalism tend to think about the relationship between criminality and state authority in light of two competing normative paradigms. For some, abuses of government authority are assumed to be fundamentally deviant; government officials who violate their public trust are regarded as ethically defective and as in need of moral sanction. In contrast, a different school of thought takes its bearings from selfish human motivations like ambition and the desire for power; it assumes that a degree of criminality is always present in political decision making. Dr. Zug's talk will contrast differing constitutional structures across and within polities (together with the behaviors these structures have tended to promote historically) in light of these two normative paradigms.