Is America Unfinished or Just Getting Started? Alexandra Natapoff on 250 Years of Justice and Injustice in the United States

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Wednesday, May 27, 2026. Less than six weeks. So the big day, the birthday, America's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary on July 4, 2026. All sorts of celebrations, of course, online. There also is an America 250 official store where they're trying to sell us T-shirts. Meanwhile, others are trying to sell us something else. All the scholars, 60 scholars at Harvard Law School have put together a book, which will be out on July 4, called America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance. It's co-edited by my guest today, Alexandra Natapoff, who teaches at Harvard Law, and she's joining us now. Early, early birthday, Alexandra. Should we be celebrating on July 4? What are you gonna be doing?

00:01:33 Alexandra Natapoff: Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be in this conversation. This book is about whether we should be celebrating, what we should be celebrating, what we might be mourning or worried about. The book, as we so often do on birthdays, is a reflection on this grand American experiment of governing through law — whether it's our financial institutions, our criminal system, how we run our elections, what we're going to do about AI, ultimately about the nature of our very democracy. And so these essays, 62 of them by 62 different professors, are each grappling with a piece of your question. Should we be celebrating? Should we be worried? What is the history? What's going on? What might we do? Piece by piece by piece of this enormous experiment that we have been running for two hundred and fifty years.

00:02:33 Andrew Keen: I like the title, or I'm not sure if I like the title. It's certainly provocative. America Unfinished. It suggests that America could be finished. We, of course, many times on this show talk about Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the end of history, much misunderstood by many people, but, of course, history never ends. Is this title meant literally? Do you believe in the idea of America being finished at some point, maybe in the twenty-first or twenty-second century — perfected, so to speak?

00:03:06 Alexandra Natapoff: Well, we took the title, of course, from the Gettysburg Address, which is reproduced at the beginning of the book so readers can go back and take a look at the original, where Lincoln told us that the duty of the living, in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, is to continue the unfinished work that the soldiers who died on that field had begun. And what he meant by that, he said, was a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And so we thought that that insight, that challenge really of unfinished work and unfinished democracy that we are consistently and constantly working on together, really captured the spirit of the inquiry that we wanted to engage in at this moment, that we felt invited and compelled to engage in at this moment. Another milestone, another birthday, the 250th, but also in the face of enormous changes and challenges and conflicts in our system of law and governance. It's not so much a claim that America might be finished, although in some of the essays you will see legal scholars arguing that pieces of our governance structure are over, obsolete, anachronistic, should be changed. So it might be that pieces of American governance are finished and the argument is that perhaps they should be replaced now in our modern era by something else. So you will certainly see many arguments like that throughout the book. But as long as democracy is a collective endeavor of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished, because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.

00:05:09 Andrew Keen: You use those two words interchangeably, it seems, America and democracy. If there's one word to describe this history of America, this unfinished history, is it democracy? Is that how you and your fellow writers at the Harvard Law School, is that how you think about America?

00:05:27 Alexandra Natapoff: Yeah. You're right to call me on that, to swap out those words. The book is actually about law and governance, which might or might not be congruent with democracy in any particular space. In my own work, I work in the criminal justice space. I've been working and writing around that area for twenty years now, and I have argued many times that our criminal system fails many tests of democracy — that it's exclusive, that it's inegalitarian, that it is overly coercive, that it's inconsistent with many principles of our democracy. So you're right, it is not the same thing. And many of the essays in this book disagree about the state of stability, of success of various pieces of our democracy. So one might say that this is an inquiry into whether it is fair to call any particular piece of our governance, our legal governance system, a democracy — which I do think in our collective view would be a compliment.

00:06:41 Andrew Keen: You're an American like so many other hundreds of millions. You mentioned that you focus on criminal justice. You wrote a book back in 2018, Punishment Without Crime. You focus on the police and prosecution. One piece described you as a law professor who talks about how misdemeanors sweep Blacks into the criminal system. Tell me about yourself, Alexandra. Where did your family come from? When did they come to America?

00:07:16 Alexandra Natapoff: My family were immigrants. They were part of the exodus of Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, fleeing pogroms and religious persecution, and came to New York as so many did. My parents were first-generation Americans. They went to public school. And the value that public school gave them, the support and the resources that gave them, instilled a very strong sense of the value of education in our family. I was very fortunate to have an excellent, excellent education growing up. I then became a federal public defender in the federal courts in Baltimore after law school, which means I defended people accused of federal crimes by the government. So in some sense, my day job was to be adverse to the federal government all day every day. And those insights, frankly, in litigating and arguing on behalf of some of the most vulnerable and dispossessed people in Baltimore against the massive resources and power of the federal government, is reminiscent of many of the conversations we see today — people facing off against the federal government in ways that people are often, frankly, not used to. But it was my job before I became a law professor. And now I have the good fortune as a scholar, as a legal academic, to think about the mechanisms that I worked in, that I saw, that I saw my clients surviving, that I saw in the communities that I worked in — and to try to understand how it is that our criminal system, which is a central piece of our democratic infrastructure, successful or unsuccessful as it may be, how that criminal system is doing a disservice to America, how it might be strengthened, how it might be more egalitarian and more fair while accomplishing the things — safety, security, fairness, equality — that we would ask from a functioning criminal system. So that's how I got here.

00:09:38 Andrew Keen: As I said, the book comes, I think, with 62 essays from your colleagues at Harvard Law School. I think you told me before we went live that this is the first time you strong-armed, if that's the right word, your colleagues to put this kind of collection together. Must be rather like herding cats. Some people see Harvard Law School as a bastion of the coastal progressive elite. Do you think that that's fair? I mean, is this book, America Unfinished, just another progressive rant about inequality and unfairness and injustice in America?

00:10:21 Alexandra Natapoff: So it definitely is not just another progressive rant, although some of the essays could fairly be described that way.

00:10:30 Andrew Keen: Which ones? Right? Now you've nailed it. Which ones?

00:10:33 Alexandra Natapoff: Mine. Mine. You can read mine. It's a progressive rant. But we don't all agree. Many of the essays, for example, don't talk about politics at all, don't talk about inequality at all. They talk about the structure of capital markets and corporate law. So there's a wide range of views. We have splits. So the book is organized into 15 different sections around subject-matter areas — whether it's about the Supreme Court or whether it's about criminal law, whether it's about economic governance or free speech. And within each section, there is enormous disagreement. I'll just flag one that might be of particular interest to your listeners: the section on the Supreme Court, luminous constitutional law scholars arguing about whether the Supreme Court is the problem or the solution.

00:11:49 Andrew Keen: Right. And the authors of those, Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan and then Richard Re — they're in disagreement, then.

00:11:56 Alexandra Natapoff: And they are in disagreement about how we should understand the role of the Supreme Court, both today at this moment, as the court has leaned particularly conservative — and by some arguments, but not all, in a partisan way, not a judicially neutral way, but a partisan political way — should the Court have the last word on how we can run this arrangement? Or should Congress, our democratically elected representatives, should Congress have the last word? So these scholars, all of whom have had decades of experience in this space, don't agree about how our most basic institutions of governance should be run. And neither are progressive rants. They are, I think it's fair to say, quite impassioned arguments about weaknesses, failures, crises that our judiciary is undergoing, but neither of them, I think, fit neatly into the progressive or conservative box.

00:13:17 Andrew Keen: Alexandra, your book comes with a blurb from one of America's most distinguished civil rights activists, Bryan Stevenson. He says, "A valuable contribution to understanding America at a critical moment." You noted earlier that the title of the book is taken from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which, whatever one makes of Stevenson's remarks, was a critical moment in American history. Has there ever been a moment in America which isn't critical? Can you ever imagine a year where somebody like Stevenson couldn't talk about America at a critical moment, a crossroads, a fork in the road?

00:14:00 Alexandra Natapoff: Yeah. That's a great question. And I think you'll find 62 different answers in the book. So from my perspective, just to pull my thread — in the space of the criminal system, we have different critical moments than we might have in election law or corporate law. Turning points — whether it's the war on crime and the war on drugs, the murder of George Floyd and the reaction of the American public to that spasm of the criminal system — those critical moments, those turning points, don't necessarily match up with turning points in other spaces. I think one of the values of this collection is that readers can see all these different views about what might be critical about this particular moment. I think we are seeing convergences of a lot of changes in a lot of spaces all at once, which is why I think Stevenson's description is a fair one. But you're right, every moment has a kind of fingerprint of importance and crisis. And depending on your expertise, depending on your point of view, you might think that the critical moment was long ago — and this is just the fruits of a critical moment that happened before. We have a wonderful array of historians in this collection, and I think they ground us to remind us that this is not our first rodeo. We have had crises of judicial supremacy before. We have had crises of executive authority before. We have had congressional crises before. Of course, we've had national crises of war and secession, and they remind us that the process of governance and building our governance system is iterative. Over and over again, we can learn from the past, but it doesn't answer the question of what we should do today.

00:16:06 Andrew Keen: What did some of those historians think of the title America Unfinished? You've got an essay from Jill Lepore, don't you?

00:16:13 Alexandra Natapoff: We do.

00:16:14 Andrew Keen: Who, of course, just won the Pulitzer Prize for her latest work. Does she teach at the law school?

00:16:21 Alexandra Natapoff: She does.

00:16:24 Andrew Keen: Tell me a little bit about Lepore's contribution. I hope you'll be able to convince her to come on the show maybe closer to July 4.

00:16:32 Alexandra Natapoff: Yes. She's a little busy now because of the —

00:16:35 Andrew Keen: I can imagine. That's why I'm getting your help.

00:16:39 Alexandra Natapoff: That's why you're stuck with me today. So her contribution is about the president's power to declare war, which — as you mentioned in our conversation before we went on air — one of the aspects of this moment of crisis, of course, is the war in Iran, and more and more domestically speaking, the process by which we got there. Of course, Congress did not authorize that international use of force, that war. And the Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress. It's not ambiguous. It's right there in the Constitution. And so Lepore's essay reminds us of that fact, and then she tells us this fascinating story of the powerful struggles that led, essentially up until Vietnam, where everyone assumed that it would only ever be Congress that could declare war — and then the Vietnam era, which we can put on our list of critical moments in American history, turning points in American history when so many things changed. And she describes how that moment altered the balance of power between the executive and Congress on the ground, even though, of course, the Constitution never changed. The Constitution never shifted that authority from Congress to the president. And she zooms out. She tells us the big story. She zooms in and tells us the fights that senators were having during the Vietnam War about whether it was appropriate for the president to have that kind of power, whether Congress should give that power to the president. They gave it. They took it away. And then, in her view, Congress essentially conceded it by not protecting it, by letting the executive engage in international force and going to war over and over again without congressional authority. And so her conclusion is that even though, on paper, Congress has the exclusive authority to declare war, it would take a lot for Congress to claw that power back at this stage, because in effect, Congress hasn't defended its authority sufficiently, in her view. And I'd just like to mention — it's one of the things that I really love about this collection — that that essay is in conversation with a very different essay written by Daniel Nagin, who is the director of the Veterans Law Clinic here at Harvard Law School, which serves indigent veterans who need legal assistance and teaches our students how to provide those kinds of legal services. And he describes a completely different aspect of this choice to go to war, which is its impact on service members and, in his view, the severe failures of our governance structure to support and take care of those service members after they have served their country. We permit them to live in poverty. We don't provide sufficient health care. We permit them to descend into addiction and homelessness. And he mourns the fact that this quintessential decision to go to war has been permitted to extract such a toll on the people without whom the decision could not be made. So two very different experts from very different legal spaces giving us a more holistic sense of this all-important question of what does it mean for America to go to war.

00:20:43 Andrew Keen: There seem to be maybe two themes in American history — I mean, more than two, but two particularly come to mind. You're a scholar and an activist in injustice, the criminal system, racial injustice. Of course, that's been a perpetual feature of the history of this country after independence and certainly before, and we've done many, many shows on that. On the other hand, you mentioned the Lepore essay on decisions to go to war. Back in, I think, just after the First World War in 1919, America had a standing army the size of Portugal or Sweden. It was not a military power. It didn't think of itself as a military power, and didn't have that much of a history in imperial terms. So clearly, the twentieth-century history of America is of a profound change in its sense of itself and its place in the world. We've done a number of shows recently on American military culture, lots of criticisms of that. What does this book, Alexandra, tell us about the next two hundred and fifty or the next fifty years? Does it suggest that America is caught in the rut of history? I mean, race, of course, comes to mind. It never seems to be able to escape from racial injustice and racial debate. But on the other hand, new stuff comes up. I mean, fifty years ago, no one had even heard of AI, and now that seems to be an important feature. You've dedicated a section in the book to it. What does the collection tell us about how history, American history in particular, does or doesn't repeat itself?

00:22:25 Alexandra Natapoff: Another great question. Let me back up just a moment, because you said something that I just wanna unpack a little, which is — you called me a scholar and an activist. And I think that's an implicit recognition of how important scholarship can be, because I don't march. I don't organize rallies. I don't do the kinds of things that one might associate with a person who is an activist. But I have tried to write and engage in scholarship, as have many of my colleagues, in ways that are relevant to the large questions of our polity and of our governance. So I just want to flag for your listeners, but also frankly for my students, to think about what it means to be a legal scholar, to be a lawyer, to write — and to realize that this work is influential even if it doesn't look like what we might call traditional activism. So I wanna say thank you for according that kind of power to writing books and writing law review articles, which is frankly what I do. You asked, what does this collection tell us about the future of American history and history repeating itself? Which, of course, is an enormous question that I couldn't possibly answer. I don't think any collection of 62 essays could answer it, but we jumped off from Lepore's essay, so let's start there. So Lepore lays out the history of this fight, this struggle, this power struggle between the executive and Congress over who gets to decide whether we should go to war. And you pointed out that war — that the state use of violence internationally, of course, as well as domestically — is one of the perennial challenges of any governance structure, as well as race, poverty, inequality, these perennial issues that return again and again and are cyclical. So in the section right before the section in which Lepore's essay sits, there are five or six scholars who write about America's relationship to the international order. And I think that collection of essays actually gives a really rich response and set of answers to your question. What does the history tell us about how we have engaged this question since, frankly, since 1776? So Professor Alford reminds us that we have been having this argument for 250 years. What is our place in the international legal order? Both as a matter of war and violence — the Declaration of Independence itself was also a declaration of war. It was the colonies declaring war on Britain. So our founding document is in some sense an answer to the question of how is it that we will decide to go to war. And remember what the Declaration tells us. It says, This should not be done lightly. We should not cast off old ways lightly. It's expensive. It's violent. It's disruptive. We should only do it when it's central and important and necessary to the preservation, as the founders thought of it, of our natural rights to thrive as individuals, as free individuals.

00:26:09 Andrew Keen: In other words, when we invade Iran, maybe slightly questionable. You dedicate the book — I'm gonna quote the dedication: "We dedicate this book to the principles and promise of academic freedom and to all the people who have risked and sacrificed so much over the centuries so that we may still exercise it." Obviously, implicitly or explicitly, that's a defense of academic freedom. Harvard University, of course, has been in the news recently in its struggles, conflicts with the administration. Is there a political element to this book in the sense that you are standing up for free speech, Alexandra?

00:26:54 Alexandra Natapoff: Well, if standing up for our ability to do our jobs is political, then yes. And it's not implicit. We say in the introduction that it would be disingenuous for us not to acknowledge that our parent university, Harvard University, is currently in litigation, in conflict with the administration over the meaning of academic freedom. Does the federal government get to tell us what to say, who to hire, how to organize our work? This is an old fight. Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin writes a beautiful essay about the relationship between the exercise of academic freedom and the civil rights movement, and understanding our own history of power struggles over inclusion and exclusion. So yes, this collection is in some sense our way of appreciating and defending the fact that we have the privilege of academic freedom. Academic freedom is not free. It's a benefit. It's a privilege that advocates — you talked about activists — people have stood up for, gone to jail for, lost their jobs, been on hit lists, been blacklisted for decades in American history. And the fact that we get to write things that people disagree with, that people don't like — not just academics disagreeing, but that the public doesn't like, that people in power might not like, that the private sector might not like, that the president might not like — that's a privilege. And so it seemed to us at this moment that the best way to appreciate that privilege was to exercise it. And indeed — I don't speak for my colleagues. I don't think anyone could speak for my colleagues. They wouldn't like it, so I'll speak only for myself. But I think, looking back at this critical moment, as Bryan Stevenson calls it, I would feel bad if I had not profoundly appreciated the benefits of my own academic freedom and tried to do something to honor it and not just rest on the privilege. So I see this as a way, indeed an appropriate way, for scholars and academics who benefit from academic freedom to express our appreciation to the American history that made it possible.

00:29:37 Andrew Keen: Are there any essays which are self-reflective in the ambivalence, the contradiction, not just of law school, perhaps, particularly of Harvard Law School? If people were just coming to this cold and they were listening to you, they would assume that you're teaching a generation of activists, of people who wanna make the world a better place, who commit themselves to racial or international justice or injustice of some sort. But, of course, Harvard Law School mostly graduates men and women who make great deals of money and are not particularly interested in making the world a better place. Does that get addressed in the book — the role of, not so much law, but law school, and the way in which, on the one hand, it generates moral leadership like yourself, Bryan Stevenson — I'm not sure Bryan Stevenson actually went to law school — and on the other hand, the captains of industry, of capitalism, the billionaire class that aren't, at this point, particularly popular in America?

00:30:47 Alexandra Natapoff: Again, there's a lot in that question. So first of all, Bryan Stevenson is an alum, an alumnus of Harvard Law School. So he's a very prominent lawyer as well.

00:30:58 Andrew Keen: Can you help me get him? He's Alabama-based, of course, isn't he?

00:31:03 Alexandra Natapoff: You can try. Alright. Talk to me after. We'll see what we can do. I'm interested by your line that people listening to this podcast would assume that Harvard Law School is training activists and do-gooders. From my own perspective, I would say, you know, that's nice work if you can get it. Your description of what our students actually do is more accurate. Most of our students become private-sector lawyers. I will say, however, that is not inconsistent with wanting to make the world a better place. We shouldn't write off the entire private sector as incapable of doing good just because it doesn't have "public interest" at the beginning of a title. Now I should say, I myself have not worked in the private sector. I have had choices in my life, and I was able to work in public interest and in government and in education. So I am no expert on what it's like to work in the private sector. But many of my students who I teach, who we all teach, have a deep desire to help others, to do well. So your question was, is there any self-reflection about legal education, about Harvard Law School, about the role of Harvard Law School in the legal profession? And the answer is absolutely. The second-to-last — I think it's section 14, but I could be wrong — there's a series of essays about the legal profession, rule of law, and legal education, if I'm right. That first essay, by Professor David Wilkins, who directs the Center on the Legal Profession here at Harvard Law School — he's a prominent scholar of not just the legal profession, but with deep expertise in what you would call the elite legal spaces, big law, the billion-dollar industry that makes big law possible and its relationship to the American economy and corporate America. And he excoriates the legal profession. He says, we need to take better care of our ethics. We need to stand up for our independence. We need to be blunt and open about the pressures on us to act not as independent ethical legal agents, but essentially as legal hitmen. And so he challenges the legal profession to be cognizant of its failures. Professor Lawrence and Professor Umunna give, I think, a glimpse into how we try to teach our students to use their extraordinary opportunities as elite lawyers, which is what we graduate every year. We send 500 elite lawyers into the world. How we teach them to try to use those skills for good, whatever sector of the legal profession and the economy they're in. So it's not an on-off switch. It's not either you're a good person or a bad person, or you do public interest or you go into the private sector. Part of law school, part of legal education, part of being an attorney, is figuring out how to be an ethical contributor to this project of law, whatever your job title happens to be.

00:34:57 Andrew Keen: We're gonna try and interview some more of your contributors. So we're not gonna get into the weeds, so to speak. Lots of interesting questions. And lots of people who have been on the show before — people like Noah Feldman, Cass Sunstein. So hopefully, we'll get some of them. Maybe you'll help me get Bryan Stevenson and some others. But finally, Alexandra, there was an interesting book that came out last year, did rather well, by Dan Wang, the Canada-based economics journalist, called Breakneck. It's about China's quest to engineer the future. It's a book that compares China and America, suggesting that China is run by engineers and America by lawyers. Do you think — I'm less interested in your view on China. I know that's not an area that you're particularly focused on academically. But do you think it'd be fair to say that America, over the last two hundred and fifty years, for better or worse, has been a country run by lawyers? I mean, Trump isn't, of course, a graduate of law school. One wonders whether he would be able to graduate from law school. But many, many postwar American presidents did attend law school, many, of course, from Harvard. Is that a fair way to perhaps contrast America and China, and America's role in the world as a country run by lawyers and by legal principles of one kind or another?

00:36:34 Alexandra Natapoff: Just to — sorry — I haven't read Breakneck. I will note that Professor Alford's essay is about the relationship in the international space between China and the United States, and the ways in which the United States' interactions with the international legal arena today are opening up spaces for China. So folks who are interested in that might take a look at that particular essay. So I think lawyers would like to think that America has been run by lawyers. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I think it's much more complicated than that. And the essays in the book take different views. So if you look at — one of my favorite sections, frankly, as we wrap up — the section on the future of economic governance, in which six very different scholars who disagree about almost everything, disagree about even how to frame the question, come together to talk about some surprisingly similar challenges that we face in this decision about economic governance. And if you ask those scholars, they wouldn't say it was the lawyers. They would say it's the money, one way or another. It's the financial interest, it's the corporate interest, it's the ownership class, one way or another, that has been running America — and that lawyers have been part, indeed helpful to, that management scheme, but that it wouldn't be fair to say that the lawyers were making those decisions.

00:38:16 Andrew Keen: How did you, by the way, convince all these fancy law professors at Harvard to limit their essays to a thousand words? I bet you had lots of people screaming at you on the phone telling you that they needed more than a thousand words.

00:38:29 Alexandra Natapoff: I think that's fair. I will note that before I was a law professor, I was a federal public defender, which means I got hollered at by judges and prosecutors all the time. So I don't mind being hollered at in the service of a good cause. And ultimately, I think our colleagues saw that, for example, in order to produce this book this year, during the birthday of the Declaration of Independence, it had to be short. It had to be much faster than usually books are produced. Just to shout out to MIT Press for doing an extraordinary, extraordinary job making this possible this year. Many presses would not have been able to help us put this together so fast. And one last note for your listeners: six months after publication, after July 4, this book will become open access, which means anybody can read it for free, anybody in the world. And we're very grateful. We're thrilled that this is the case. We're very grateful to MIT Press for making this possible. Of course, they're giving up revenue by agreeing to do this, but we think that this is the spirit of the conversation that we need to be having — that it shouldn't be expensive to be part of this conversation, to hear from people like my colleagues, to hear this expertise. So we hope that this conversation will be ongoing, not just at this moment, not just on this birthday and this anniversary, but for years to come.

00:40:14 Andrew Keen: So why would anyone buy the book if they can get it free in six months?

00:40:18 Alexandra Natapoff: Well, I count myself as one of these people. I like books. It's a little old school. It's a little analog, but there's something about sitting there with the object that I think many people do appreciate. This is a little bit of history. You could imagine in five, ten, fifty years, historians looking back and saying, "Wow, 2026. That was quite a year."

00:40:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's better than the T-shirt, isn't it, that they're hawking on America 250. So I'm gonna end, Alexandra. You've been a good sport dealing with my obnoxious questions. I'm gonna ask you the most unfair question of all, and you probably won't answer it, but I'll still ask it. Apart from your own essay, of course, what's your favorite one? If people do indeed read this book, buy the book, or perhaps read it for free in six months' time, which one single essay do you think somehow captures the spirit of this remarkable country's history of the last two hundred and fifty years?

00:41:28 Alexandra Natapoff: So it's an unfair question, because of course, you're trying to get me to pick a fight with 62 of my colleagues, because I would have to pick among them. So I'm not going to do that. But I will flag an essay — the very last essay of the book — by Molly Brady. By Maureen — we call her Molly — but Professor Brady, who's one of the nation's great historians and experts on property law. And she ends on a note that is both, I think, realistic and challenging, but also hopeful, to describe how it is that we have permitted something as important as property law to undermine community. We've permitted suburban sprawl and the destruction of physical community and the destruction of the kinds of physical infrastructure and property infrastructure that make analog, book-based, go-to-your-library, hang-out-with-your-neighbors community possible, even as property law has been profligate in its support for the digital world, for social media, for the non-analog, dispersed, thinner version of community. And she exhorts us to remember how law can contribute in positive ways, how it has contributed in positive ways to things we are proud of about our communities, and how we need to stand up for that vision of law and not just let it wash over us passively. And so while I love many of the essays, I think Professor Brady's essay captures both the challenge — as Bryan Stevenson would say, the critical nature of this moment — but also why law and lawyering and thinking about law is not only important, but maybe holds out some important promise.

00:43:22 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The book is out on July 4. We're gonna have a series of shows. I'm gonna try and get some of the writers, the contributors of the thousand-word essays from America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance. It's co-edited by my guest, Alexandra Natapoff, and — we haven't mentioned him — Guy-Uriel Charles, your colleague in this endeavor. Congratulations, Alexandra, on a wonderful book, a collection from important writers, and I hope you enjoy July 4.

00:43:53 Alexandra Natapoff: Thank you so much.