A collaborative conference supports a new book asking us to reimagine freedom and democracy.
As the United States reaches its 250th anniversary, many Americans have an increasing sense that their democracy is under threat. Across the country, Americans are distrustful of institutions of government. While voter fraud is incredibly rare, fears of rigged or unfair elections have entered the mainstream. As the number of Americans reporting feeling lonely rises, incidents of gun violence, politically motivated or otherwise, stoke fear and mistrust of others. Addressing these many interrelated problems is a complex challenge.
Dominant frameworks assign a number of causes to the many breakdowns of this political moment: the spread of misinformation has been accelerated by AI technology and high social media usage; political polarization has increased violence and made it difficult for people to trust one another; institutions are simply breaking down. While scholarship and public discourse have addressed many of these symptoms of democratic erosion, there is a possible deeper source of democratic collapse that is going unaddressed.
Over the last two years, Laura Beth Nielsen has been at work on a book-length manuscript titled “The Democracy We Deserve: Freedom, Rights, and the Road Back to One Another.” The empirically informed political theory of the book aims to go beyond addressing institutional fixes or new procedures to reconsider democracy itself as a moral and social practice.
Nielsen is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. At Northwestern University, she is the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair and a Professor of Sociology.
Nielsen presented an early version of this argument in her presidential address titled “Relational rights: a vision for law and society scholarship,” which she delivered to the Law and Society Association in 2024, when she was serving as the organization’s president.
In challenging dominant frameworks of understanding democratic collapse, “The Democracy We Deserve” advances the claim that American democracy is decaying because it treats rights and liberties as individual possessions rather than treating them as scaffolds for relational practices.
The book aims to think about democracy as being connected to relational conditions: When relational conditions break down, and people correctly determine that they cannot trust the world around them or secure their own material safety, this damages democracy. When relational conditions are damaged—when people lose trust in their government, cannot afford housing, or are unsafe in their communities—they may begin to feel that their political participation is meaningless or become increasingly convinced that vigilantism is the only way to bring about justice and safety.
Restoring democracy, then, is not a matter of cooling political disagreement or quelling misinformation, but of addressing the breakdown of relational conditions like trust, reciprocity, shared vulnerability, and material security which sustain democratic participation.
Taking up the relational thinking of the book itself, Nielsen will convene a conference at the ABF to support the completion of the manuscript. The conference, scheduled for summer of 2026, will bring together a group of senior scholars across law, sociology, political science, political theory, and other fields for sustained engagement with the manuscript. The conference aims to go beyond providing piecemeal notes or critiques to generate deep, impactful feedback on the manuscript.
The completed manuscript aims to be valuable to scholars in law and society as well as those working in other areas that address the pressing issue of democratic collapse. It also hopes to reach a broader public audience beyond the academy. The book produced by Nielsen and this conference will also stand as an example of what this model of relational, collaborative scholarship can produce.