Rachel Ramirez-Guest

Rachel Ramirez-Guest is a climate and environmental attorney whose public work includes serving as a staff attorney at the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law and prior work as Assistant Corporation Counsel in the Environmental Law Division of the New York City Law Department. Her writing and legal work focus on environmental justice, clean energy, and state climate and environmental enforcement.

The Declaration’s Promise Now Depends on Political Reform and Shared Symbols

At the Aspen Ideas Festival session “General Assembly: The Idea of America,” Danielle Allen, Martha Jones, Shilo Brooks and Reihan Salam treated the Declaration of Independence as a living inheritance whose authority now depends on more than anniversary reverence. Their shared dispute was over what must sustain its claim of equality in a changed country: Allen emphasized institutional reform and democratic accountability, Jones insisted on confronting slavery, citizenship and present contradictions, Shilo Brooks stressed the moral and philosophical force behind equality, and Salam argued that a credal nation still needs a culture capable of carrying shared symbols across demographic change.

The Aspen InstituteJun 30, 202621 min read