The Steven M. Polan Fellowship in Constitutional Law and History

About the Fellows

• Michele Goodwin

  Michele Bratcher Goodwin is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy.Goodwin’s project, “The New Jane Crow,” will cultivate thought leadership, narrative creation, and programming that will include written commentary, podcasts, and a roundtable focused on 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

  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

  Alan Jenkins is a professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Alan 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 & Bertrall Ross

  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 and highlighting the inadequacy of theories of interpretation that fix 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

  Robinson Woodward-Burns is an associate professor of political science at Howard University. Woodward-Burns’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.