Book Talk with Dr. Richard Primus

Welcome to a Book Talk with Dr. Richard Primus
Join us at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education for an engaging discussion with renowned constitutional scholar Dr. Richard Primus.

He will share insights from his latest book:
The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power
(Harvard University Press, 2025)

Explore the fascinating world of constitutional law and the enduring debates that continue to shape American governance.

Richard Primus, the Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, teaches the law, theory, and history of the US Constitution. In 2008, he won the first-ever Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies for his work on the relationship between history and constitutional interpretation. Primus is now a senior editorial adviser of the Journal of American Constitutional History. The students of Michigan Law have given him the L. Hart Wright Award for outstanding teaching on four separate occasions.

His writing has appeared in many leading law reviews as well as in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. Opinions of the justices of the US Supreme Court have cited his scholarship. Primus’s most recent book, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press, 2025) is a challenge to decades of conventional wisdom on one of the foundational issues of American constitutional law.

Primus works with constitutional law on the state level as well as the federal level. He has helped state governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private businesses solve practical problems involving state-level constitutional law, both in Michigan and in other states.

He is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance and a member of the Board of Advisors of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fighting threats to free and fair self-government. He also is a faculty affiliate of the University of Michigan’s Program in Race, Law, and History.

Primus practiced law in the Washington, DC, office of Jenner & Block before joining the Michigan Law faculty in 2001.

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