The Brennan Center for Justice is pleased to announce the selection of the 2025–2026 recipients of the Steven M. Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History. The Polan Fellows program provides a platform for outstanding individuals — including legal practitioners, advocates, and scholars — to spur urgently needed debate over the meaning and promise of the U.S. Constitution.
The 2025–2026 Polan fellows:
- Michele Goodwin is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown Law. Goodwin’s project for her Polan fellowship, “The New Jane Crow,” will cultivate thought leadership, narrative creation, and programming that will include written commentary, podcasts, and a roundtable focused on the topic of history, constitutionalism, and reproductive justice. The project will bring to light underarticulated constitutional narratives related to reproductive justice and embed them in the popular discourse.
- Brian Highsmith is an incoming assistant professor at the UCLA School of Law and a PhD candidate in government and social policy at Harvard University. As a Polan Fellow, Highsmith will conduct a project on state constitutional history and the constitutional harms of concentrated economic power, comprised of academic publications and a public convening on the anti-oligarchy principle in state constitutions. The project will consider, among other things, how specific provisions of state constitutions were intended to guard against the exercise of oligarchic power and how they should be applied today.
- Alan Jenkins is a professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Jenkins will engage in a project of research, writing, publication, and public outreach around a diverse “Founding Family” of thinkers, writers, and leaders that can expand the universe of voices and narratives that matter in interpreting our founding charter. The project will bring the concept of the “Founding Family” to multiple audiences, including scholars, general readers, and young people.
- Joy Milligan and Bertrall Ross are professors of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. They will use the fellowship to advance “Democracy and the Constitution: Addressing the Legacy of Exclusion,” a book project defining egalitarian democracy as the touchstone for constitutional legitimacy. They will highlight the inadequacy of theories of interpretation that tie us to an undemocratic past. As part of the fellowship, they will advance the arguments in their forthcoming book in scholarly and public venues.
- Robinson Woodward-Burns is an associate professor of political science at Howard University. Robinson’s project will chronicle the evolution of state constitutional voting rights through various interventions, including a book manuscript, a state constitutional amendments database, and a scholarly roundtable on state constitutionalism, voting, and elections. The project will deepen the scholarship around a critical and underexplored area.
Polan Fellows are a pillar of the Brennan Center’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s turn toward originalism, a deeply flawed method of constitutional interpretation that threatens to roll back centuries of hard-won progress on reproductive rights, racial justice, gun safety, and environmental justice, and more.
Alongside the Brennan Center’s Historians Council and Kohlberg Center, Steven M. Polan Fellows will respond to this cramped vision of constitutional law and history by bringing forward new thinking that can reclaim our national charter as an enduring plan of government rooted in the aspiration to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
The 2025–2026 Polan Fellows, drawn from the ranks of law, academia, and public interest advocacy, will join the Brennan Center’s fight for the future of the Constitution. Deploying a variety of strategies — including legal and historical research, original writing, symposia and events, and public education projects — the fellows will hone new approaches to reclaim our Constitution as an enduring yet evolving plan of government rooted in democratic values.
The fellowship is named in memory of Steven Marc Polan (1951–2023), a 1976 graduate of NYU School of Law. After many years of public service in New York City and state governments, Steve became a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, with a practice devoted to developing and improving public infrastructure.
Inspired by his lifelong commitment to democratic values, the Brennan Center launched this multiyear initiative to counter originalism and advance sounder alternative approaches to constitutional interpretation. This project, initiated by Steve during his lifetime, is made possible through the generous support of his family.
