America's Constitution: A Biography |  | Author: Akhil Reed Amar
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
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Media: Hardcover
Edition: Book Club
Pages: 672
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Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.8
ISBN: 1400062624
Dewey Decimal Number: 342.73029
EAN: 9781400062621
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Product Description
In America’s Constitution, one of this era’s most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of one of the world’s great political texts. Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it.
We all know this much: the Constitution is neither immutable nor perfect. Amar shows us how the story of this one relatively compact document reflects the story of America more generally. (For example, much of the Constitution, including the glorious-sounding “We the People,” was lifted from existing American legal texts, including early state constitutions.) In short, the Constitution was as much a product of its environment as it was a product of its individual creators’ inspired genius.
Despite the Constitution’s flaws, its role in guiding our republic has been nothing short of amazing. Skillfully placing the document in the context of late-eighteenth-century American politics, America’s Constitution explains, for instance, whether there is anything in the Constitution that is unamendable; the reason America adopted an electoral college; why a president must be at least thirty-five years old; and why–for now, at least–only those citizens who were born under the American flag can become president.
From his unique perspective, Amar also gives us unconventional wisdom about the Constitution and its significance throughout the nation’s history. For one thing, we see that the Constitution has been far more democratic than is conventionally understood. Even though the document was drafted by white landholders, a remarkably large number of citizens (by the standards of 1787) were allowed to vote up or down on it, and the document’s later amendments eventually extended the vote to virtually all Americans.
We also learn that the Founders’ Constitution was far more slavocratic than many would acknowledge: the “three fifths” clause gave the South extra political clout for every slave it owned or acquired. As a result, slaveholding Virginians held the presidency all but four of the Republic’s first thirty-six years, and proslavery forces eventually came to dominate much of the federal government prior to Lincoln’s election.
Ambitious, even-handed, eminently accessible, and often surprising, America’s Constitution is an indispensable work, bound to become a standard reference for any student of history and all citizens of the United States.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 37
 A holistic view of the Constitution November 1, 2005
R. Price (Liverpool, New York)
74 out of 80 found this review helpful
Constitutional scholars are familiar with the quality and innovation of Amar's previous works and this brilliant new book will not disappoint. Of course, some will react negatively to the very title. By calling it a "biography," many scholars will immediately be hostile because it implies a "living" Constitution, which means "judicial activism." Amar uses biography because the Constitution is a living entity, and his account looks at its "birth" in 1787 through its maturation (i.e. amendments) up to the present. The sheer immensity of this project is overwhelming. Amar examines the meaning of nearly every provision of the Constitution. He looks at the document from a holistic perspective, seeking to incorporate the best elements of legal, historical, and political science scholarship in order to achieve a full representation of its meaning. While the length of this work is impossible to summarize in this short review, some things should be noted as particularly original. Amar highlights the interesting fact that the original Constitution was ratified in a more democratic and popular way then is commonly supposed; most states removed the suffrage limitations and allowed near universal (white) male suffrage. Another point of interest is the emphasis of geostrategic security and the related issue of unilateral succession, which Amar argues was not constitutionally permissive. This is only the tip of the iceberg, and I highly recommend this book. Amar's writing style is engaging and capable of understanding even by the layperson who does not have an obsession with the Constitution. For those, like myself, who are constitutionally obsessed, Amar presents refreshing and innovative approaches to many constitutional provisions, some of which modern scholars tend to ignore.
I was pleased to see that Amar noted in his postscript certain limitations to his study that I became concerned of during my reading. First, the meaning he describes is his own opinion on the issue, and is often surprisingly tentative in its conclusion. This book is not constitutional gospel; it is intended to stir debate and critical disagreement, of which there are multiple assertions capable of attack; for example, I find his argument that "commerce" was understood to encompass interactions not limited to economics unconvincing. Second, and more important, is his admission that his account emphasizes the written constitution and largely ignores the unwritten (or, more properly, unenacted) portions of our constitution, such as judicial interpretation, foundational statutes, and norms and practices of our system. I sincerely hope that someone, perhaps even Amar, takes up his call for another book on this unwritten aspect of our constitutional tradition.
A Remarkable Achievement September 18, 2005
Student Of History (Los Angeles, CA)
59 out of 69 found this review helpful
Professor Amar advises U.S. Senators and the writers of "West Wing" on our constitution. He's also one of the most popular undergraduate professors at Yale. Thus I wasn't surprised that this biography of our Constitution was thoughtful and remarkable in its scope. What did surprise me was how easy it was to read and how fascinating it was on every page. This book should be required reading for Supreme Court Justices and high school American History teachers, and all sorts of folks in between.
great intro to the constitution June 2, 2006
Jon Bornholdt (Schweinfurt Germany)
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
Amar explains in his postscript that his aim in writing this book was "to offer a comprehensive account of America's Constitution, introducing the reader both to the legal text (and its consequences) and to the political deeds that gave rise to that text." He has achieved this aim splendidly. This phrase-by-phrase guided tour through the document never fails to inform and provoke, whether or not one agrees with its author (and I don't always). It's also a very approachable book, in terms of both style and content. The knowledge base assumed here is considerable, but not forbidding: anybody with a good working knowledge of the Seven Articles and the better-known Amendments ought to be able to thread his way profitably through Amar's lucid and energetic narrative.
Amar considers himself a "textualist," which as far as I can tell amounts to a kind of principled "public-meaning" originalism of the kind advocated by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Bork. His (very) close reading of the text is always informed by a knowledge of the range of plausible meanings available to 18th-century users of a given word or phrase, and generally (with some crucial exceptions--see below) by a comprehensive familiarity with the historical circumstances that led to the adoption of that word or phrase. At the same time, he stresses that the source of the Constitution's meaning must be located in the stated AND UNSTATED intentions of the document's authors AND RATIFIERS, to the extent that those intentions can be reliably recovered. In itself, this is an admirable approach; it avoids both the pitfalls of crude authorial-intent originalism (i.e., interpreting the Constitution by pretending to read James Madison's mind) and those of "loose constructionism" (i.e., interpreting the Constitution to mean anything we can plausibly strong-arm the text into saying), and we feel we are in the presence of an honest and well-informed guide whose ideological commitments take a back seat to his desire to share what he knows. It's also refreshing to encounter a politically liberal philosopher of law who unabashedly cares about literal meaning and authors' and ratifiers' intent--thus giving the lie to the silly claim that interpretive philosophy is a mere function of political orientation. The devil is in the details, however, and Amar has his share of hits and misses. I'll give one example of each.
The virtues of Amar's textualism are very much in evidence in his analysis of the Preamble. Contrasting the ratification process of the Articles of Confederation with that of the Constitution, Amar persuasively argues not only that the Union formed under the Constitution was legally indissoluble by unilateral secession, but that it was so understood by its authors and ratifiers. He secures this result by a close reading of the phrase "more perfect union": the proposal of such a union, Amar demonstrates, was based at least in part on the legal (and legally indissoluble) union of England and Scotland in 1707. Moreover, as Amar reminds us, it was widely agreed by Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike that the new government would be impossible to back out of: for the Feds this was, if anything, an advantage (albeit one to keep quiet about), while for Anti-Feds it was deplorable and dangerous. A nice feature of this analysis is Amar's reading of the Feds' relative silence on the issue of secession: had it been generally understood that unilateral secession would remain as a sovereign right of states under the new Constitution, the Feds would certainly have stressed the fact in order to reassure and win over their opponents. They didn't. All of this--the historical background of the union of Scotland and England, the explicit pronouncements of the participants in the great debate on ratification, and the "roaring silence" of the Federalists on the issue of unilateral secession--is used to give dispositive content to a phrase normally dismissed as a rhetorical flourish. (To be sure, the Court itself appealed to the phrase "more perfect union" in Texas v. White, its 1869 decision disallowing secession; but the reasoning in Texas is tortuous and unpersuasive, ascribing a weirdly persisting occult validity to the Articles of Confederation except as explicitly overridden by the Constitution. Amar's account is much cleaner and more intuitive.)
Now for an example of Amar's occasional tendency to privilege dictionary definitions over plausible, contextually determined, and historically informed readings. Amar makes much of the fact that the word "commerce" had at the Founding, and retains today, a range of meanings that go beyond simply "trade": the word could also be used to mean "all forms of intercourse in the affairs of life, whether or not narrowly economic or mediated by explicit markets" (p. 107). Thus, in his opinion, the Commerce Clause has been too narrowly construed in modern jurisprudence; a return to the Gibbons v. Ogden reading, which Amar evidently prefers on ideological grounds, might be bolstered by the assumption that the Framers intended the broadest possible construal of the word "commerce" in the first place. This is wildly implausible. A glance at Article 1, Section 8, shows a list of specific powers granted to Congress; the commerce power is sandwiched between the power to "borrow money on the credit of the United States" and the power to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization." Clearly, a general grant of power to regulate "all forms of intercourse in the affairs of life," etc., has no place on such a list. Madison's remarks in Federalists 42 and 45 are surely also relevant here: in both numbers, Publius treats "commerce" as a mere synonym for "trade." Nor is this an idiosyncratic reading; to the best of my knowledge, it's how the clause was read by all sides in the ratification debate. The moral here is that "public meaning" isn't enough to license an interpretation: some "live" meanings of words are simply disallowed by context. (In the Commerce Clause, for example, "Indian Tribes" doesn't mean tribes in India.) I'm no kind of expert in this field, but it certainly strikes me as more plausible to ascribe the broadenings and narrowings of interpretive approaches to Congress's "power. . .to regulate commerce" to fluctuations in the scope and authority the Court has chosen to read into the "necessary and proper" clause. In other words, what's been going on here for the better part of two centuries is a debate not over the meaning of "commerce," but of "power" and "regulate."
There is immensely more to this book than just the above two arguments, of course: I selected them merely to illustrate the kind of analysis Amar is engaging in here, and the degree of focus and care required both to appreciate and to criticize this kind of work. For the rest, I find Amar's focus on the Reconstruction Amendments as the keystone of the retooled Constitution to be absolutely on target (though at the end of the day I don't see as much difference as he does between his own approach to the legitimacy of Amendments 13 and 14 and Bruce Ackerman's approach), and his defense of the Incorporation Doctrine about as convincing as any I've read. And there's much, much more--fascinating analyses of the long-term effects of the 12th and 22nd Amendments, speculations about amendment paradoxes (I'm a sucker for these), a disquieting discussion of the possibly unconstitutional and unworkable legal machinery governing presidential succession, and on and on.
The thematics of liberal originalism February 5, 2006
greg taylor (Portland, Oregon United States)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
This is that rare book. Anyone interested in the history of the United States or it's government should read this book. Not necessarily because it settles anything but because it argues so well for positions that are not mainstream. You ignore Amar at the risk of your own ignorance.
Two things about the reading of this book. Read the Postscript both before and after the main text. This will greatly clarify
your understanding of Amar's purpose and methodology. Also, make sure to religiously read the footnotes. Much of the supporting data is to be therein as well as cogent outlines of many a scholarly debate.
Amar has two major overarching themes:
1. "...the Founder's Constitution was more democratic, more slavocratic and more geostrategically inspire than is generally recognized..." (p.471).
2. Amar focuses on the various acts of constitutional ratification and amendment as being maybe more important than the text itself.
His working of this last point is continually brilliant. For example, Amar focuses a lot on how Washington established many a precedent for the President. "This seemed particularly appropriate because the American people in 1787-1789 understood that the Constitutuion was designed for Washington, whose precedent-setting actions would...help concretize its meaning..." (p. 479 but see also p.134)
Another example has been mentioned by some of the other reviewers but is worth repeating. Amar points out that the vote for the delegates to the ratification conventions in the various states were more inclusive than usual. The Founders recognized that the legitimacy of the Constitution rested on popular sovreignity. In their cover letter to Congress presenting the Constitution, they explicitely called for the ratification by convention. The people of the states had copies of the Constitution to study and discuss before the election and the election was only about the delegates to be selected for the conventions. "A vote for convention delegates thus approximated a direct rederendum on the document..." (p.308).
Amar makes powerful arguments about his slavocratic thesis as well. He explores the full political effects of the three-fifths clause not just on the make-up of the Congress but on the electoral college (where overrepresentation of the South gave the Presidency to Jefferson in 1800). Like Sean Wilentz in his recent The Rise of Democracy, Amar also notes the way that the three-fifths clause was adapted by Southern states into their own constitutions were it warped their own internal politics in favor of the Slavocrats (most especially, South Carolina).
About the geostrategic implications of the Founder's Constitution, I refer the reader to my review of Max Edling's A Revolution in Favor of Government. Edling's book is a well-developed exploration of this thesis.
One more point about the Founding. Amar's discussion of the nationalistic implications of the Preamble are worth the price of the book alone. One of the reviewers below wonders how Amar can justify his ideas in light of several of the Federalist Papers. I suppose he would know if he had actually read Amar's book but let me try to help him out. The Federalist Papers were political arguments made in the middle of the debate about ratification in a very important state, New York. They do not so much represent accurately what the authors thought about the Constitution as what they thought would convince delegates to vote to accept it. For example, Madison both in the Constitutional Convention and later, in the First Congress when presenting his version of the Bill of Rights, tried to incorporate a national veto on state laws. Sounds pretty nationalistic to me.
Amar points out that during the ratification debates that no one thought to assert a right to secession. It simply was not part of the debates except in New York where such a proposal was explicitely voted down. Amar quotes a letter to Hamilton from Madison where Madison explicitely denied the right to even conditional secession and noted that the Constitution had "been so adopted by the other States". (p. 38 of Amar and the July 20,1788 letter of Madison to Hamilton in 11:189 of Madison's Papers). If the States were understood to be unable to unilaterally withdraw, then they were understood to have lost a great measure of their sovereignity.
Amar's discussion of everything after the Founding is equally rich. He feels, as I do, that it is this subsequent history that is the glory of our Constitutional history. He discusses every amendment and its origins. His overarching theme for this part of the story is the expansion of democracy. Whether it is the Reconstruction Amendments or the various amendments at the turn of the century that mandated the popular elections of Senators, the progressive income tax and women's vote, to Amar it is all about expanding the power of the American people to control their government.
One other point and one criticism and then I will shut the heck up.
One of the best points that Amar makes throughout his book is that Constitutional interpretation does not just belong to the Supreme Court. The President (unfortunately for us at this time) has to act on the basis of how (s)he understands the document as does Congress (see the writings of David P. Currie).
But several times, the people themselves have worked to overturn bad Supreme Court rulings (the progressive income tax and, of course, the anti-abortion movement). Amar is very clear about this. It is ours to interpret and put into effect.
My one criticism of Amar, however, is an important one. Amar insists that constitutional interpretation is open-ended but I do feel his history of that early interpretation is one-sided.
Read his footnotes carefully. He relies extensively on Joseph Story, on an essay by Tench Coxe and on Noal Webster, solid Federalists all. While he is very well versed in Elliot's Debates and Farrand's Records, I do not get the feeling that he has the feel for the Anti-Federalists as does,say, Saul Cornell. Later writers like John Taylor, St. George Tucker and that miscreant (IMHO) Calhoun are nowhere to be seen.
As I said, I feel this is an important flaw but it is far from a fatal one. I stand by my opening. If you have suffered through this entire review, you simply must read Amar's book. I plan to use it as a reference source and to reread it again in five years. I know I will learn as much from the second reading as from the first. For the scholarship and the careful thought that goes into presenting his thoughts on what is our Foundational document, Amar is a national treasure.
An in-depth study of the constitution and how it should be interpreted in contemporary society September 22, 2005
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
81 out of 106 found this review helpful
While President Bush spent the month of August at his Crawford, Texas ranch, various newspaper accounts mused over the list of books that were part of the President's summer reading. Several times during Mr. Bush's summer sojourn, he spoke to Americans and Iraqis alike regarding the ongoing debate and negotiations over the new Iraqi constitution. One wishes that the President had received an advance copy of Akhil Reed Amar's AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION to include on his summer reading list. At this critical time for the fledgling nation of Iraq, as well as for American citizens, the President would have been well served to consider the message of this exhaustive clause-by-clause analysis of one of the most important documents of world history. Indeed, as the Iraqis struggle with the creation of their constitution, the President might consider sending a copy of AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION to each member of the Iraqi Parliament.
Since 1985, Professor Amar has served as a constitutional law scholar on the faculty of Yale Law School. In 1998 he published THE BILL OF RIGHTS: Creation and Reconstruction, an important and provocative contribution to constitutional doctrine and interpretation. AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION continues the discussion that has come to the fore in American jurisprudential debate --- what does the constitution say and how should we interpret its meaning in contemporary society? As our nation prepares to add two new justices to the Supreme Court, the magnitude of this debate and its impact on our nation's future cannot be underestimated by any citizen.
Not counting amendments, the U.S. Constitution has 4,400 words. It is the oldest and shortest constitution in the world. Considering that brevity, it may be difficult for readers to contemplate nearly 500 pages of line-by-line analysis of each provision of the Constitution. But Professor Amar's thorough and detailed analysis of the Constitution is so well-written and true to a fundamental theoretical argument that readers will be hard pressed to find any superfluous writing in this remarkable work of legal and historical scholarship.
Space limitations make a detailed discussion of Amar's constitutional theology (his first chapter is titled "In the Beginning") impossible. The overriding argument of AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION is that certain key themes representing basic commitments of the founding fathers tie the Constitution together. Before discussing that argument it is crucial to consider Amar's discussion of important lessons gleaned from the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. That discussion is significant because of the important lessons it provides to the modern world where new nations such as Iraq struggle to write a document to provide for the growth of a fledgling nation.
Regardless of one's political views on the war in Iraq, only imprudent individuals would view the ongoing drafting of a Constitution for that nation without reference to historical context. Professor Amar cogently provides that context for the Constitution of 1787 and in so doing offers important lessons for the current struggle to create a government in Iraq. In 1787 the drafters of our Constitution had little actual experience in democracy. There were few such governments in the world. Indeed, democratic principles filtered up from the various individual states of the union whose democratic experience was very limited. Anyone knowledgeable in Middle Eastern history cannot deny that Iraqis have very little in the way of a democratic template to assist them in creating a constitution.
Equally significant to the drafting of the Constitution were the circumstances behind the birth of the American nation. The Declaration of Independence established the right of people to escape the evils of tyrannical rule. By 1787 the nation had existed for some years under the Articles of Confederation. The new Constitution required the drafters to address the right of citizens to change their form of government in a peaceful fashion. By that process the Constitution gave citizens of the United States far more democracy than any nation had ever experienced. Today in Iraq, a nation long governed by tyranny has seen its government removed not by revolution but by an outside force. How a new nation is born will have substantial influence in how it chooses to govern itself. As the world views the Iraqi struggle with constitutional democracy, these concerns cannot be ignored.
AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION was not written as a primer on how Iraq should draft a constitution. Professor Amar certainly did not intend that his book would be limited to offering insight into the difficulties Iraqis face in drafting a constitution. While that historical insight is significant, equally noteworthy is what AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION offers readers by way of discussion about America's past, present and future in the area of constitutional jurisprudence.
As America prepares to welcome two new Justices to the Supreme Court, the ongoing debate over constitutional interpretation grows more strident. Should the original intent of the founders guide constitutional interpretation, or is the Constitution a living document that was intended to confront contemporary issues based upon more contemporary legal doctrine? Professor Amar finds merit in both arguments but also believes that there is still much room in the Constitution for interpretation between the lines that the founding fathers deliberately kept sparse.
As he wrote AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION, Amar had no way of knowing how important his book would be to contemporary issues in the world and in our nation. Perhaps that is the greatest tribute one can pay to this extraordinary work. Even without the current effort in Iraq to create a constitution and the current vacancies on our Supreme Court, this would be an important book. Contemporary events make it a book that demands to be read in order to promote intelligent discussion of critical issues for our nation and the world.
--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
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