The Constitution is as important as ever 222 years after its ratification, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese said in a lecture on campus Thursday.

The lecture, held in the Bunn Intercultural Center Auditorium, was the second installment of the [Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy](https://government.georgetown.edu/tocquevilleforum/) this academic year. The topic asked, “Is the Constitution relevant today?”

“Every time government at any level carries out its responsibilities in accordance with the constitution, we recertify the constitution as being relevant,” Meese said.

uch of the lecture focused on the conflict between judicial restraint, in which judges limit themselves to interpreting the document, and judicial activism, in which judges apply their own political ideas in making constitutional decisions.

“What those words, `judicial restraint,’ really mean is the key to the relevance of the Constitution today, and is the basis by which we preserve the constitutional fidelity,” Meese said.

As an example of judicial activism, Meese cited the 2005 Supreme Court decision [Kelo v. City of New London](https://supreme.justia.com/us/545/04-108/case.html). The Court expanded the meaning of the Fifth Amendment – which says that private land could be taken by government for public use – to include public purpose. The expanded definition allowed one man’s property to be taken and resold to another citizen.

The notion of a “living constitution,” by which judges constantly change the document by individual motions instead of an amendment process, is self-defeating, Meese said.

“We would no longer have the living constitution they talk about, but we would have a dead constitution because it will have been abandoned by those people who have the responsibility to keep it alive, namely the judges,” he said.

eese is a Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and the chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at [The Heritage Foundation](https://www.heritage.org/). He served under former President Ronald Reagan as U.S. attorney general from 1985 to 1988. “