(Photo Courtesy of Marguerite Casey Foundation)
Aziz Rana received a 2025 Freedom Scholars Award, an honor that recognizes scholars who have advanced movements for justice and freedom.
The award, presented by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, named four honorees this year, and the selection process was invite-only. As part of his award, he received a $250,000 prize, which he plans to use toward pursuing research for a new book project.
Rana, the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University professor of law and government at Boston College Law School, explored the challenges and limitations of the American government as a specialist in American constitutional law and political development.
“For a vibrant civil society and for a vibrant democracy, you have to have space for people to be able to engage in knowledge production without fear,” Rana said.
The award recognizes Rana’s legal scholarship, including his first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom, and his most recent book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, which examines how reverence for the Constitution can constrain democratic reform.
“I understand the role of the scholar as a very specific one, which is about knowledge production and creating and expanding the knowledge that we have to make sense of our world, our surroundings, to confront various kinds of social questions,” Rana said.
Rana’s work particularly emphasizes the importance of scholarly work on the Constitution, given its widespread romanticization and worship in modern American culture. He said his work asks what a “democratic future horizon” might require.
“We really need to think seriously about how to both reform our institutions so that they can be responsive to popular needs, and then at the same time safeguard the kind of basic rights that are facing a profound threat at the present,” Rana said.
While he stressed his commitment to the legal profession and constitutional law, he said the Constitution’s relationship to those rights-protecting ideals is more complicated than often acknowledged.
“The worry I’ve had about the kind of romantic and sort of worshipful relationship to the actual formal text of the Constitution is that it can actually keep us from pursuing the kinds of reforms that can fulfill the basic principles that I think many Americans share,” Rana said.
Looking ahead, Rana highlighted the importance of maintaining core American ideals.
“I think it’s a time for us to rally around those values—civil liberties, principles connected to representative democracy and free and fair elections,” Rana said.
Through years of teaching courses in constitutional law, Rana said he noticed a disconnect between the narrow set of cases that dominated classroom discussion and the broader constitutional questions raised by real-world events.
“The course is set up to cover a fairly small range of cases that are basically shaped by whatever the composition of the Supreme Court might be,” Rana said. “Yet, it really felt like the students were coming to the classroom with all of the tumultuous events that were taking place outside of class that dealt with the Constitution, and yet were rarely part of our conversations.”
That gap prompts examination of how Americans came to view the Constitution through a lens of reverence that can hinder critical thinking about reform, according to Rana.
“We study the Constitution in a very specific way around these cases, that we have a language about the text of the Constitution that sometimes veers toward a kind of worshipfulness that might be unproductive in terms of its ability to help us think,” Rana said.
Rana also emphasized his dedication to justice within his classroom. Now in his third year at BC Law, Rana said he hopes his students leave his courses with tools to make sense of “the hardest questions.”
“Being a lawyer isn’t just representing a private client,” Rana said. “It’s also being like a servant of a public good, which is the law itself.”