Sign up for CAC updates

About Us

The Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) is a think tank, law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitution’s text and history. We work in our courts, through our government, and with legal scholars to preserve the rights and freedoms of all Americans and to protect our judiciary from politics and special interests. CAC launched on June 3, 2008. You can now watch videos from the launch, read CAC's launch report, see media generated by the launch, and view recent polling that documents the power of our approach.

CAC builds on the record of success produced by our predecessor organization, Community Rights Counsel.

As a think tank, CAC produces original scholarship and distills and advances the work of other scholars. We draw inspiration and insight from great Supreme Court textualists such as Chief Justice John Marshall, Justice John Marshall Harlan, and Justice Hugo Black. We produce books, reports and commentary and share this work with officials, reporters, and opinion leaders. 

As an action center, CAC promotes our conviction that the Constitution is, in its most vital respects, a progressive document, written by revolutionaries and amended by those who prevailed in the most tumultuous social upheavals our nation’s history – the Reconstruction Republicans after the Civil War, the Progressives and the Suffragettes in the early 20th Century, the Civil Rights and student movements in the 1950s and 1960s. We promote this vision of the Constitution through collaboration, our writings - including our two blogs, Warming Law and Text & History, engagement in the public discourse, and direct outreach.

As a law firm, CAC chooses the best cases to bring our ideas about the Constitution into court and secure victories in the U.S. Supreme Court, state supreme courts, and federal courts of appeal that move the law in a direction that comports with text and history. Our predecessor organization used arguments rooted in text and history to help win important Supreme Court victories.

• A Record of Success