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By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI27)

St. John’s College has long been perceived as an incubator for future lawyers thanks to its discussion-based curriculum and a reading list that includes landmark Supreme Court cases alongside authors like Aristotle, Locke, and Tocqueville. Roles were reversed at the college this past July, however, when 20 judges, attorneys, and professors affiliated with the American Law Institute (ALI) and the Bolch Judicial Institute of Duke Law School sat down together at a seminar table in Santa Fe.

The group had converged on Monte Sol to partake in “From Unalienable Rights to a New Birth of Freedom: Law and the American Experiment”—an inaugural St. John’s seminar series organized in collaboration with ALI and Bolch. Participants soon found themselves enmeshed elbows deep (and hundreds of pages) in a new kind of American experiment: reading three centuries of legal history in just four days, all while using Program-style conversation and analysis to gain fresh insights on texts considered to be cornerstones of modern democracy.

Instrumental to bringing this geographically diverse cohort and their respective institutions together in the Land of Enchantment was David Levi. A retired California U.S. district judge, Levi serves as president of the ALI and is a James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean Emeritus of Law at Duke University and Director Emeritus of the Bolch Judicial Institute. Levi is also a champion of the Great Books thanks to his close ties with the University of Chicago: his father, the lawyer, academic, and U.S. Attorney General Edward H. Levi, received both his BA and JD from Chicago, taught in its Great Books course as a graduate student, and returned to serve as law school dean before being named the university’s eighth president.

In appreciation of the St. John’s Program, which shares intellectual DNA with the University of Chicago, and of his chosen home state in retirement—the Duke legal scholar now lives in Corrales, New Mexico, where his wife’s family has ranched since the 1960s—Levi brainstormed the four-day Santa Fe seminar series with colleagues including current ALI member and former St. John’s College President Nora Demleitner. “It’s a beautiful campus,” Levi says of St. John’s, “and just having a college of that caliber adds a lot to the state and the region. It’s a really important institution in the Southwest.”

In true Johnnie style, “Law and the American Experiment” and its lengthy excursion through American history stemmed from a single question: “We started with the Declaration of Independence,” Levi says, “and tried to understand what it meant by ‘All men are created equal.’ The new birth of freedom that Lincoln would later talk about was very much based upon his understanding of those words.”

St. John’s tutors Krishnan Venkatesh and Leah Lasell, representing both campuses, kicked off each day by guiding the group through close readings of seminal American texts: the Declaration of Independence (including its original draft), the United States Constitution, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions ranging from Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Cooper v. Aaron (1958), among others. Following these discussions and a short coffee break, Duke University instructors Richard Brodhead, the school’s ninth president; Jedediah Purdy, Duke’s Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law; and Levi provided historical and legal context for class readings while incorporating relevant themes from earlier that morning.

Eloquently laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, America’s founding principles—justice, equality, and individual liberty—all “came under terrible stress as the country struggled with the terrible problem of slavery that could only be, it turned out, solved by the most violent war in our history,” Levi reflects. “The idea that we would then move forward with amended documents but with the same commitment to this ideal of equal treatment, equal dignity, that you find in the Declaration is a very powerful story. It’s the story of America.”

Outside the classroom, communal meals provided opportunities for continued camaraderie, as did excursions to local landmarks such as the Santa Fe Opera. A group dinner at the Museum Hill Café provided even more food for thought when Richard Brodhead, who had written the 2013 report on the liberal arts for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and St. John’s College President J. Walter Sterling engaged in dialogue over dessert, conversing on the current state of liberal arts education and its lasting importance.

Participants emerged from their seminar bubble four days later with renewed perspective. Texts like the country’s founding documents, although by no means simplistic, have “a certain amount of purity to them,” says New Mexico Supreme Court Justice David Thomson. “There’s an attraction to going back to core concepts we founded our democracy on, basic concepts of philosophy and natural rights.”

But as history has continuously shown, these principles aren’t static, which is why it’s imperative in a rapidly changing world to revisit and discuss them with others.

“The Bolch Judicial Institute, the American Law Institute, and St. John’s College are all deeply committed to the democratic process: you learn through civic debate and showing respect for people’s views,” Levi says. “It’s important to be articulate, but it’s also important to be a good listener; these are skills, or even virtues, at the root of what makes a democracy possible. These are the attributes of citizenship. And each one of our organizations, from a slightly different angle, is dedicated to those things.”