Peter Sagal's Constitution Sessions: The Warren Court and Its Enemies
Wait Wait Don't Tell Me host Peter Sagal asks whether the Warren Court invented constitutional rights — or revealed them — in a sharp Lakeview Day lecture at CHF.
Why we picked this
The Warren Court expanded rights that Americans now take for granted — and its critics never stopped arguing those rights were invented, not found. Sagal's framing of that debate as an open question makes for genuinely compelling constitutional history.
Peter Sagal is best known as the host of NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, but he is also a serious constitutional scholar whose book The Annotated Constitution and lecture series have made American constitutional history accessible to general audiences without dumbing it down. His Constitution Sessions at the Chicago Humanities Festival explore specific episodes and questions in American constitutional development.
At Lakeview Day, he takes on the Warren Court — the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969 — and the foundational debate about whether landmark decisions on desegregation, criminal procedure, and privacy represented judicial discovery or judicial invention. The question “Did the Court invent rights, or reveal them?” is not merely historical: it is the fault line in every contemporary argument about the role of courts in a democracy.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Lakeview Day at the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture.