Center of the American Experiment announced today the launch of rationally BASED, a podcast discussing cutting-edge legal topics featuring Ilan Wurman, the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. Wurman will be joined by American Experiment podcast hosts Kathryn Johnson and Grace Keating. The rationally BASED podcast is an intellectual legal podcast from a conservative perspective with the goal of making relevant legal topics accessible to non-lawyers. Pairing non-lawyer hosts (Johnson and Keating) with legal expert Wurman creates an interesting dynamic as they explain the legal issues of the day in a fun and edgy manner.
The podcast kicked off with a one-hour episode covering the recent church protest in Minnesota and the FACE Act, the role of warrants, Minnesota’s lawsuit against ICE and the Insurrection Act. In addition to covering cutting-edge legal events and questions, the podcast will be about law itself and the big ideas surrounding law.
Future issues of the rationally BASED podcast will discuss birthright citizenship, the legality of capturing Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro, the role of the judiciary, the deep state and agency independence, and the future of the conservative legal movement.
“The rationally BASED podcast will be intellectually challenging and accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike, filling an important void in the national podcast landscape,” said Wurman. “More importantly, it will be edgy and fun.”
Ilan Wurman is the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He previously taught at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. His academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Minnesota Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Texas Law Review among other journals.
Professor Wurman is the author of a casebook, Administrative Law Theory and Fundamentals: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 3d ed. 2025). He is also the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). His next book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction, is also forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
rationally BASED is presented by Center of the American Experiment and can be found here.
