Erwin Chemerinsky
No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States
(W. W. Norton, August 2024)
Read Erwin Chemerinsky’s piece on social media moderation in the Los Angeles Times
No Democracy Lasts Forever argues that the Constitution has become a threat to American democracy and must be dramatically changed or replaced if secession is to be avoided.
Deeply troubled by the Constitution’s inherent flaws, Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned dean of Berkeley law school, came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy. Pointing out that just fifteen of the 11,848 amendments proposed since 1789 have passed, Chemerinsky contends that the very nature of our polarization results from the Constitution’s “bad bones,” which have created a government that no longer works or has the confidence of the public. Yet political armageddon can still be avoided, Chemerinsky writes, if a new constitutional convention is empowered to replace the Constitution of 1787, much as the Founding Fathers replaced the outdated Articles of Confederation. If this isn’t possible, Americans must give serious thought to forms of secession—including a United States structured like the European Union—based on a recognition that what divides us as a country is, in fact, greater than what unites us.
Praise for No Democracy Lasts Forever
“Dean Chemerinsky makes crystal clear how original defects in the US Constitution have combined with judicial decisions to cement minority rule rather than democracy. As a result, majority-backed gun control, reproductive rights, and remedies for racial inequality are non-starters. The book offers specific reforms that could be adopted even within the current framework. Most bold are its arguments a new constitution …No Democracy Lasts Forever is must reading for anyone who care about this nation and its future.”
—Martha Minow, Former Dean, Harvard Law School
“Chemerinsky’s piercing diagnosis of the state of American democracy centers the U.S. Constitution as the protagonist in the story of its unraveling and dares us to reimagine the document’s core principles and embrace a revolutionary refounding of our country…His audacious blueprint for a constitutional convention merits contemplation by anyone invested in the future of the U.S.—which should be all of us.”
—Janai S. Nelson, President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
“When one of the country’s most distinguished and sober-minded legal scholars argues that the Constitution imperils democracy, Americans should take note. When he further argues that the Constitution is pushing us to the brink of secession, Americans should take action. Erwin Chemerinsky’s No Democracy Lasts Forever offers not only a powerful indictment of the U.S. constitutional system but also a clarifying call to remake our supreme law before it’s too late.”
—David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
“Magnificent as the Constitution is, argues Erwin Chemerinsky, it also has great flaws that ultimately may bring about the collapse of the American experiment. The Constitution which was supposed to create a democracy has instead created a grave political crisis, ..No Democracy Lasts Forever is a powerful and profound work of scholarship and reasoning that raises questions worth the attention of all thinking Americans.”
—Ellis Cose, author of Race and Reckoning: From Founding Fathers to Today’s Disrupters
Erwin Chemerinsky is a Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law and the Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He holds a law degree from Harvard Law School, is the bestselling author of 15 books and was named National Jurist’s most influential person in US legal education in 2014 and 2017.