Editor's note: This piece is excerpted from a story in the Washington Square News.

"NYU’s School of Law debuted its Democracy Project last month, rolling out plans to research current threats to U.S. democracy and convene scholars across political affiliations to discuss bipartisan solutions. 

The program’s co-founders, NYU Law professors Bob Bauer, Samuel Issacharoff and Richard Pildes, came up with the idea in 2021, aiming to address extremism and define the boundaries of U.S. executive power. Through the initiative’s research, the professors are focusing on merging diverse perspectives to address increasing polarization, starting in the United States before expanding to other countries. 

'One of our central focuses is that we are trying to understand the difficulties of democratic governance, worldwide,' Pildes told WSN. 'If anything, we view the United States as part of an ecosystem of democratic states around the world all of whom are facing very similar problems.' 

In the project’s first phase, “100 Ideas in 100 Days,” a group of select scholars, public officials, practitioners and thought leaders across political parties are working to offer 100 new theories on the state of democracy. Participants thus far have included Jake Sullivan, national security advisor to former President Joe Biden and Mark Cuban, Shark Tank entrepreneur and businessman. 

The Democracy Project has already published its first essay by Caleb Nelson, a University of Virginia law professor and former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. His piece explores executive power and removal through the lens of originalism, a way of interpreting the Constitution as exactly what it meant when it was written. While Nelson has historically taken conservative standpoints, his essay criticized the current U.S. Supreme Court for its rulings to expand executive power. 

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Issacharoff said that the university programs will especially focus on how education can be altered to promote healthy civic understanding and leadership. However, he added that the most pressing currently revolves around the essays. 'This project was initially created before the current administration,' Issacharoff said. 'We wanted to go back to the foundational principles of what it means to have a representative democracy.'

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'We expect the Democracy Project to continue indefinitely, and to be a significant contributor to the vibrant intellectual ethos of both the Law School and NYU as a whole,' NYU Law Dean Troy McKenzie wrote in an email statement to WSN."

Read the full piece here.