Fall 2023 Vacketta - DLA Piper Lecture on the Role of Government and the Law - Lori Ringhand

Are we a democracy, or republic? To ask this question is to pick a fight in today's America. But the distinction between the two is rarely as crisp as the most passionate participants in this debate assume, and our original founders often used the terms interchangeably. The questions our founders struggled with were not whether we would be a democracy or a republic - we are both, and more - but rather how to organize the institutions that would structure our system of self-government. In a democratic republic like ours, "the people" rule, but who are the people and how do they rule? These are the issues that divided the 1787 founders, and they remain at the root of many of our deepest debates today.