Citizens must understand and exercise their constitutional freedoms, said Washington College of Law Professor Jamin Raskin at the Kennedy Political Union's seventh installment of its Finest Faculty lecture series Thursday.
Raskin, a newly elected Maryland state senator, teaches courses on constitutional and international economic law at the WCL.
Raskin was also an active constitutional lawyer, a best-selling author and voting rights advocate, as well as being the former assistant attorney general of Massachusetts and general counsel to the Rainbow Coalition.
"The fun thing about my career is that I have really been able to merge my teaching and my scholarship," Raskin said.
When Ross Perot ran for president in 1992, his comparative success for a third party candidate earned him access to federal election funding in the 1996 election. During that race, he was excluded from major presidential debates by collaboration between Democratic candidate Bill Clinton and Republican candidate Bob Dole.
This bipartisan cooperation earned sharp criticism from Raskin, who was hired to represent Perot and maintains that the major parties' actions were illegal.
"[A debate] is supposed to be non-partisan," he said. "[The two parties] collaborated in the dilution and destruction of the rights of the people."
Raskin also discussed the Marshall-Brennan Fellows Program, which he both founded and currently directs. The program sends law students out to public high schools in Maryland and D.C. to teach about the U.S. Constitution.
"Young people have the means of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves against sucker arguments," he said.
He also criticized the public education system for not further educating students about their rights.
"The high schools that should be teaching students about their rights are trampling their rights, so we're missing an extraordinary opportunity to educate Americans about their rights," Raskin said.
Raskin wrote "We the Students: Supreme Court Decisions for and About Students" to further educate America's youth about their rights.
People generally have "got an obligation to be constitutional patriots," he said. "We have to actualize them in what we do as citizens."
Julia Dahl, a graduate student in the School of Communication, said she agreed with the idea of better constitutional education.
"I think that ... citizens would be much better served if we taught their rights in school, especially at a young age because I think that kids probably get their rights trampled on a lot, but they don't know it," she said.
