Liberties — according to experts — that we sometimes take for granted.

“It is a privilege for many of us to walk through our lives and not have to think about our constitutional rights every single day, because there are people for whom these rights are unfortunately being taken away,” Brickner said, noting issues of disenfranchisement and a mass incarceration system that disproportionately affects Black and brown Americans. “And we are at a place where that is becoming more common in our country. Violations are hitting scary numbers.”

So what can we do about it?

UD senior and History Club president Justin Richards, who conceived of the panel discussion, noted this is largely the point of the Constitution Day event — to educate people on their rights so they can hold on to them in the future. It's an effort supported by UD’s Departments of History, Political Science and International Relations, Africana Studies, the Biden Institute and the Career Center.

“It is important to understand how current events, like criminal justice reform, relate to the Constitution,” he said. “In order to move forward, I’m a firm believer we need to remember where we came from. We need to learn from the past.”

Take the 14th Amendment, one of three Reconstruction-era changes to the Constitution which panelists will explore. This amendment ensured the citizenship of formerly enslaved individuals, but since that time, because it affirms equal protection under the law, “it has allowed for a huge number of different kinds of people to come forward with other kinds of claims far beyond this,” said Alison Parker, panelist and chair of the Department of History at UD. “It is now the basis for the protection of gays to marry and the notion that you could have a right to privacy that might gain you access to birth control and/or abortion — that all comes from an expanded sense of what life and liberty is, under the 14th Amendment.”

The Reconstruction Amendments, which were also responsible for abolishing slavery and guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race, represent a racially charged period in time that “in many ways replicates our own,” said Dael Norwood, panel moderator and assistant professor of history at UD. In this sense, studying the Constitution should give us a sense of the danger — and also the promise — of the present moment.