Framing the 28th Amendment

The four Framers of BPL’s 28th Amendment discuss the process of crafting a legally actionable amendment based on the ideas gathered from hundreds of participants from the 32 town halls. Anand Giridharadas, author (Winners Take All; The True American); Susan Herman, President of the American Civil Liberties Union; Kimberly Peeler-Allen, Co-Founder of Higher Heights and Board Chair of the ERA Coalition; and Nathaniel Rich, author (Losing Earth; King Zeno).

They will be joined by the three town hall moderators, Craig Manbauman, Brian Tate and Brynna Tucker.

Our Framers

Anand Giridharadas is an editor-at-large for TIME, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, having written, most recently, the biweekly “Letter from America.” He has also written for The Times’s arts, business, and travel pages, and its Book Review, Sunday Review, and magazine–and for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

He is the author of, most recently, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, published by Knopf in 2018. His other books are The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him (optioned for movie adaption by Annapurna Pictures); and India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking, about returning to the India his parents left.

He has been the recipient of honors from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale, the Henry Crown Fellowship of the Aspen Institute, the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year award, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture from Harvard University, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award.

Anand lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya Parker, and two children.

Susan N. Herman was elected President of the American Civil Liberties Union in October 2008, after having served on the ACLU National Board of Directors, as a member of the Executive Committee, and as General Counsel.

She writes extensively on constitutional and criminal procedure topics for scholarly and other publications, ranging from law reviews and books to periodicals and on-line publications. Her most recent book, Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy, (Oxford University Press 2011; 2014 paperback), is the winner of the 2012 Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

Herman has also participated in Supreme Court litigation, writing and collaborating on amicus curiae briefs for the ACLU on a range of constitutional criminal procedure issues, most recently in Riley v. California, 134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014), where the Supreme Court accepted the argument that cell phones cannot be searched “incident to arrest” without a search warrant.

Herman received a B.A. from Barnard College as a philosophy major, and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Note and Comment Editor on the N.Y.U. Law Review. Before entering teaching, Professor Herman was Pro Se Law Clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Staff Attorney and then Associate Director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York.

Kimberly Peeler-Allen has been working at the intersection of race, gender, and politics for almost 20 years. Kimberly is the Co-Founder, alongside Glynda Carr, of Higher Heights, a national organization building the political power and leadership of Black women from the voting booth to elected office. Kimberly served as finance director for Letitia James’ successful bid to become Public Advocate of the City of New York and the first African American woman elected citywide in New York’s history.

Launched in 2018, Kimberly is a founding member and served as Board Chair of ReflectUS, a non-partisan coalition of some of the nation’s leading organizations focused on women’s political leadership. ReflectUS is a data-driven effort to fast-track gender representation at all levels of government. The ground-breaking coalition is designed to increase the number of women elected to office and achieve representation in politics for women from across the ideological, racial, ethnic, and geographic spectrum.

Kimberly also serves as a board member of ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equity as well as NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Kimberly is drawing on her life experience as an organizer and operative to write her first book, Activist Momma, a celebration of this intersection and the gifts that mothers bring to movement work. It profiles the lives of a group of Black women who are leading some of the most impactful movements at the local and national level.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History, which received awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physicists and was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize; and the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a writer-at-large at the New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. His next book, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade, will be published in April. Rich lives in New Orleans.