F2630 Democracy vs. the United States Senate
Class | Registration opens Monday, September 14, 2026 10:00 AM EDT
As every American schoolchild learns, each state gets two seats in the U.S. Senate. According to the traditional explanation, that allocation makes sense because of a Great Compromise by which one house of Congress represents the people and the other represents the states. But in reality, the Senate was not born of compromise among the Constitution’s Framers. It was born of a simple power play, one that everyone involved understood to be essentially unprincipled. There is not, and never has been, a justification for giving every state the same power in the Senate despite widely varying populations.
In-person at the Hawk - Recorded
Richard Primus
Richard Primus is the Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He is a former Rhodes Scholar, a senior editorial advisor of the Journal of American Constitutional History, and the corecipient of the first-ever Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies. Early in his career, Primus served as law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court. His most recent book is The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press, 2025).