Annual Meeting with Guest Speaker Akhil Reed Amar

Pequot Library is excited to host Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, as the guest speaker for the 2025 Annual Meeting in partnership with the Yale Alumni Association of Fairfield County. Professor Amar’s presentation will include a Q & A. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Scroll down to read more about the lecture. The business portion of Pequot Library’s Annual Meeting will follow.

All are welcome to attend the 136th Annual Meeting to celebrate the progress and accomplishments the library has seen in the last year. Friends of Pequot Library can vote on the slate of officers and board members for the coming year.

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Politics at Yale Law School and a world-renowned expert on the history of the Constitution. He has been cited in over fifty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and regularly testifies before Congress on Constitutional questions. But most of all, Prof. Amar is a gifted teacher with a passion for the Constitution and the often messy struggle to create a “more perfect union” through its words. His first book in the trilogy, The Words that Made Us (2021), explores the eight decades from 1760-1840 as the concept of an independent country germinated and came to fruition through the words of the Founding Fathers. The third part of the trilogy, still a work in progress, will take us from 1920 to today.

Lecture: 2:00 p.m.

Business Meeting: 4:40 p.m.

Saving the Republic, Then and Now – Lessons from the Era of Abraham Lincoln: “All men are created equal”

These five simple words in the Declaration of Independence have riveted the attention of the world to the experiment that is the United States. More importantly, they are the foundation for who Americans are as a people. The fundamental concept of birth equality, so simply expressed, continues to shape and reshape the United States Constitution, our laws and society today.

In the recently released second book of his trilogy on the history of the Constitution, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920, Amar explores how those five words shaped changes to our Constitution and the nation across eighty years and a brutal Civil War, enshrining in the Constitution “four glorious amendments that abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender” (2025 Hachette Books).

Please join us as we explore with Prof. Amar the evolution of these five deceivingly simple words from the Declaration and how they served, and continue to serve, as the radical lodestar for our concept of Country.