Akhil Reed Amar - Americas Constitution: A Biography

As a reference book, it is superb. It is the fullest and most reliable explanation of the written Constitution that we have. [Amars] case for the fundamentally popular and democratic origins of the Constitution gives his book a special distinction as a work of history.

G ORDON S. W OOD

Scholarly, reflective and brimming with ideas Rarely do you find a book that embodies scholarship at its most solid and invigorating; this is such a book.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The most fascinating character in American historyour enduring Constitutionfinally has its great and deserving biographer. And what a biographer Akhil Reed Amar is! He writes like Jefferson, thinks like Madison, and speaks like Lincoln. Everyone who appreciates the Constitution must read this wonderful biography. It is indispensable to an understanding of the constitutional world in which we live.

A LAN D ERSHOWITZ , author of Preemption

Few biographies are as important or as gripping as Akhil Reed Amars life story of our constitution. A powerful narrative as well as an indispensable research tool, Americas Constitution returns the document to its rightful place at the center of our legal and political history.

J EFFREY T OOBIN , author of A Vast Conspiracy and Too Close to Call

A new and richer understanding of the prosaic founding text we routinely worship but rarely examine No scholar writing today is more sensitive to the nuances of constitutional language than Amar, and his book is full of close and thoughtful analyses.

The Nation

There is no more inspiring teacher of constitutional law in America than Akhil Reed Amar, and now all Americans will have the benefit of his scholarship, creativity, and infectious love for the Constitution. Its hard to imagine a more exciting guide to the text and history of the Constitution than this unique, surprising, and illuminating book. A tour de force that should find a wide readership for years to come.

J EFFREY R OSEN , author of The Unwanted Gaze and The Naked Crowd

An extraordinary and unique contribution to the scholarship of the Constitution.

M ARTIN G ARBUS , author of Courting Disaster

2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright 2005 by Akhil Reed Amar

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Amar, Akhil Reed.
Americas constitution: a biography / Akhil Reed Amar.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-487-6
1. Constitutional historyUnited States. I. Title.
KF4541.A87 2005
342.73029dc22 2004061464

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v3.1

For Vinita, of course,
and for our childrenVik, Kara, and Sara.
May they and their generation continue to enjoy the blessings of liberty.

Americas Constitution Beckonsa New World Acropolis open to all. Ordained in the name of the American people, repeatedly amended by them and for them, the document also addresses itself to them. It does its work in strikingly clean prose (as law goes) and with notable brevity. Its full text, including amendments, runs less than eight thousand words, a half hours read for the earnest citizen. The documents style thus invites us to explore its substance, to visit and regularly revisit Americas legal city on a hill.

Most citizens have declined the invitation. Many could probably recite at length from some favorite poem, song, speech, or scripture, yet few could quote by heart even a single paragraph of the supreme law of our land, one of the most important texts in world history. Lawyers, politicians, journalists, and opinion leaders converse fluently about legal dictums and doctrines that appear nowhere in the Constitution itself while slighting many intriguing words and concepts that do appear in the document. For instance, we rarely stop to think about what lay beneath the Constitutions promise of a more perfect Union, or why the Founders required presidents to be at least thirty-five years old, or how the Fourteenth Amendment built upon earlier bans on Titles of Nobility when it made everyone born in America a citizen[]. University professors who teach constitutional law often neglect to assign the document itself. The running joke is that reading the thing would only confuse students. The joke captures an important truth. Without background materials placing the Constitution in context, a modern reader may miss much of its meaning and richness.

This book seeks to reacquaint twenty-first-century Americans with the written Constitution. In the pages that follow, I invite readers to join me on an interpretive journey through the document, from its first words to its last clause. Along the way, we shall explore not merely what the Constitution says, but also how and why it says these things. How did various provisions at the Founding intermesh to form larger patterns of meaning and structures of decision making? How did later generations of constitutional Amenders reconfigure the system? Why did the Founders and Amenders act as they did? What lessons did they deduce from the distant past and from their own experiences? Which historically available models did they copy, and which plausible alternatives did they overlook or reject? What immediate problems were they trying to solve? Which long-range threats and possibilities did they espy on the horizon, and which future developments did they fail to foresee? What material and ideological resources did they command, and what practical constraints did they confront? How and why did their political opponents take issue with them? Who got to participate in the various decisions to ordain and, later, amend Americas supreme law?

The Constitution has given rise to a remarkable range of interpretations over the years. In the chapters that follow I offer my own take: This book is an opinionated biography of the document. For example, while I try to say at least something in passing about every paragraph of the document, I pay special attention to those aspects of the Constitution that are, in my view, particularly significant or generally misunderstood. Because readers deserve to be told about other views, this books endnotes identify contrasting perspectives (and also, where appropriate, furnish additional elaboration). In a brief Postscript, I summarize the main areas where my method and substance are, for better or worse, distinctive. For convenience, this books Appendix contains the complete text of the Constitution, keyed to the corresponding pages of my narrative.