![handle is hein.journals/geolr58 and id is 1 raw text is: 121ST SIBLEY LECTURE
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IN PERIL
The Honorable J. Michael Luttig*
We the People [in 1787] ... ordain[ed] and establish[ed] our
Constitution in Order to form a more perfect Union.1
Today, just over three years shy of the 250th anniversary of our
nation's birth, the institutions of our democracy and law are under
vicious, unsustainable, and unendurable attack-from within.
American democracy and the rule of law are in peril.
America and Americans are at a perilous crossroads. Who is it
that we have become and what is it that America has become? Is
this who we want to be and what we want America to be? And if not,
just who is it that we Americans want to be? And just what is it that
we want our America to be?
Speaking in a time of not dissimilar tumult in America nearly
two centuries ago, Abraham Lincoln urged a revival to the
Constitution and the rule of law-a renewed reverence for that
Great Charter for our governance and guarantor of our liberty.2
Lincoln sermonized with the reverence that he urged, let the
Constitution and the rule of law become the political religion of the
nation.3
America is in desperate need of such a revival to our Constitution
and the rule of law as our sixteenth President urged for the nation
in 1838-a reawakening and quickening to the reverential
Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (1991-2006). This is
the revised text of the 121st Sibley Lecture, delivered at the School of Law, University of
Georgia, Athens, on March 22, 2023. To watch a recording of the original lecture, see
American Democracy in Peril, UNIV. OF GA. SCH. OF L.,
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/lectures-pre-arch-lectures-sibley/95/
[https://perma.cc/NQ3M-FQGU].
1 U.S. CONST. pmbl.
2 See Abraham Lincoln, Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois
(Jan. 27, 1838), in 1 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 108, 112 (Roy P. Basler,
Marion Dolores Pratt, & Lloyd A. Dunlap eds., 1953) (urging Americans to adhere to the
Constitution and rule of law as a patriotic duty).
I Id. (emphasis omitted).
1](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/geolr58&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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