Carl B. Menges (upper left) chats with students and other guests who attended the Constitution Day award ceremony at the AHI

On 17 September, Constitution Day, the AHI celebrated its second birthday by holding the Second Annual David Aldrich Nelson Lecture in Constitutional Jurisprudence.  During the dinner that preceded the lecture, the AHI’s founders awarded three students with prizes for scholarly excellence. The students attended the AHI’s second annual colloquium and produced outstanding papers that explored  the nature of property rights and their connections to liberty.

The AHI is pleased to announce that Justin Villa of the University of Rochester and Timothy Minella of Hamilton College received first prizes–a one year’s subscription to the Wall Street Journal–for their papers on property rights.  Max Brindle from Hamilton College received honorable mention and was awarded an inscribed copy of Carla Main’s Bulldozed(Encounter Books, 2007), a riveting account of the abuse of the power of eminent domain in the city of Freeport, Texas.

Carl B. Menges, a graduate of Hamilton College and the Harvard Business School, established these awards in 2007 to recognize student achievement at the innovative colloquium that the AHI holds each year.  The third annual colloquium will be held at the Turning Stone Resort April 15-18 2010 and will be devoted to an exploration of the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Robert George, founder of the Madison Program at Princeton University, will keynote the event.