From the ongoing dispute at the southern border between Texas officials and the Biden administration, to the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency, the phrase constitutional crisis has been thrown around quite a lot in recent months.
While modern crises pose dangers that are clearly defined, others are subject to interpretation, such as what is meant when observers casually invoke some vaguely approaching crisis involving the institutions of government. Rolling Stone did so earlier this year, declaring with ominous certainty: “America is facing its greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War.”
“This is one of those essentially contested concepts without a fixed definition,” says Dan Urman, director of the law and public policy minor at Northeastern, who teaches courses on the Supreme Court.
