Constitutional Accountability Center Constitutional Accountability Center

About Us

Constitutional Accountability Center
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Washington as Statesman at the Constitutional Convention | Junius Brutus Stearns, Library of Congress

Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) is a think tank, law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitution’s text and history. We work in our courts, through our government, and with legal scholars to preserve the rights and freedoms of all Americans and to protect our judiciary from politics and special interests. CAC launched on June 3, 2008.

CAC builds on the record of success of our predecessor organization, Community Rights Counsel.

As a think tank, CAC produces original scholarship and distills and advances the work of other scholars. We draw inspiration and insight from great Supreme Court textualists such as Chief Justice John Marshall, Justice John Marshall Harlan, and Justice Hugo Black. We produce books, reports and commentary and share this work with officials, reporters, and opinion leaders.

As an action center, CAC promotes our conviction that the Constitution is, in its most vital respects, a progressive document, written by revolutionaries and amended by those who prevailed in the most tumultuous social upheavals in our nation’s history – the Reconstruction Republicans after the Civil War, the Progressives and the Suffragettes in the early 20th Century, the Civil Rights and student movements in the 1950s and 1960s. Through Constitutional Progressives, a coalition of leaders, organizations and individuals, we seek to wrest the Constitution from tea partiers’ control and restore our Nation’s Charter as a document that unifies and inspires all Americans, rather than divides us across ideological lines.

As a law firm, CAC chooses the best cases to bring our ideas about the Constitution into court and secure victories in the U.S. Supreme Court, state supreme courts, and lower federal courts that move the law in a direction that comports with text and history. Our predecessor organization used arguments rooted in text and history to help win important Supreme Court victories.

Through scholarship, litigation, and advocacy, we seek lasting victories rooted in the text and history of our Constitution.