WASHINGTON – Leading legal scholars and practitioners today announced the launch of the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC). The new think tank, law firm and action center is out to improve the way progressives fight conservatives over the direction of the Supreme Court, think and talk about the Constitution, and strategize to win legal victories — all by focusing on Constitutional text and history. 

The Center is launching over the next three weeks by announcing a top-flight team of attorneys, staff, consultants and advisors, holding a National Press Club forum, launching its new web site and legal blog and filing its first brief on behalf of a powerful collection of state and local government groups in a critical environmental case before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. CAC is off to fast start organizationally, already raising nearly $2 million in startup funding.

The Center has based its approach on the scholarship of legal giants such as Akhil Amar, Jack Balkin, Charles Black, and Larry Tribe, and will use it to fundamentally realign the debate over the Constitution and the Supreme Court. 

“The best legal scholarship, rooted in text and history, points to the powerful conclusion that the Constitution is progressive in its most vital respects. Through decades of empty rhetoric and flawed scholarship, conservative ‘originalists’ have tried to obscure that fact, and we’re out to reclaim the Constitution for Americans,” said Founder and President Doug Kendall.

The nation faces an election with enormous implications in November, and CAC plans to play an influential role in our courts, in the fight over judicial nominees, and the public debate over the Constitution and its meaning no matter which candidate wins the White House in 2008.

CAC grows out of the work of Community Rights Counsel (CRC), a public interest law firm that for 10 years won by focusing on what the Constitution actually says. Concentrating on environmental law, CRC has aggressively employed arguments about the Constitution’s text and history in its winning advocacy before the Supreme Court, its path-breaking work in judicial selection and its successful campaign against corporate-funded judicial junkets. 

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THE CONSTITUTIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY CENTER, a 501(c)(3), is a think tank, law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitution’s text and history. CAC works 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.