On September 13, 2012, Michael W. McConnell, Richard & Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, delivered the 2012 Walter Berns Constitution Day lecture at AEI with an address entitled “Spending, Public Debt, and Constitutional Design.” If you missed the event, you won’t want to miss reading Professor McConnell’s remarks, which have recently been published by the Program on American Citizenship.

Writing earlier this week in the Los Angeles Times in celebration of the 225th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar points out just how extraordinary and influential an event the creation of our Constitution was–and is.

In addition to releasing its opinion on the Affordable Health Care Act yesterday, the Supreme Court also issued its decision in United States v. Alvarez, deciding that the Stolen Valor Act violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.

As we noted in February, according to a study by David S. Law and Mila Versteeg, the “U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.” Indeed, when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg visited Egypt earlier this year, she remarked that we in America have “a rather old constitution” and that, instead of looking to it for guidance in constitution writing, one might instead look at the constitutions of South Africa or the European Convention on Human Rights.

On Friday, the Brookings Institution and the Center for the Constitution at James Madison’s Montepelier launched a new project that aims to bring to life Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. As Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes explains, “The result is ConText, which launched [on Friday], Madison’s birthday. Organized like the Talmud, ConText surrounds the Notes with layers of commentary—commentary on the history (what was going on in the room), current events (how these events relate to current politics), theoretical and philosophical issues, and subsequent constitutional interpretation and dispute. Like Wikipedia, that commentary will be written by a scholarly community that develops around ConText: historians, constitutional scholars and practitioners, and interested students and lay people. Both the text and the commentary are fully searchable.”

Earlier this week, Congressman David Dreier (R-California), who has been serving in Congress since 1981, announced that he would retire from the legislative body at the end of his current term. In his five-minute speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, he acknowledged Congress’s “abysmally low approval rating” even as he praised the institution.

Last week, Adam Liptak, writing in the New York Times, reported on a study that found that “the U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.” The study looked at 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries between 1946 and 2006 and concluded that “among the world’s democracies, constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall.”