Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique - Couverture souple

Gienapp, Jonathan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 030028487X ISBN 13 : 9780300284874

Editeur : Yale University Press, 2025

Synopsis

A detailed and compelling examination of how the legal theory of originalism ignores and distorts the very constitutional history from which it derives interpretive authority   "What are the chances that, in 2024, a new book could fundamentally reorient how we understand America's founding? Jonathan Gienapp . . . has written such a book. . . . You read it, and you get vertigo. . . . Gienapp's book comes as a thunderclap."–Cass Sunstein, Washington Post   Longlisted for the Cundill History Prize, 2025 • History Today Book of the Year, 2024   Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory's core tenet–that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning–has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the distant constitutional past. Yet originalist engagement with history is often deeply problematic. And now that a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court champion originalism, the task of scrutinizing originalists' use and abuse of history has never been more urgent.   In this comprehensive and novel critique of originalism, Jonathan Gienapp targets originalists' unspoken assumptions about the Constitution and its history. Originalists are committed to recovering the Constitution laid down at the American Founding, yet they often assume that the Constitution is fundamentally modern. Rather than recovering the original Constitution, they project their own understandings onto it, assuming that eighteenth-century constitutional thinking was no different than their own. They take for granted what it meant to write a constitution down, what law was, how it worked, and where it came from, and how a constitution's meaning was fixed. In the process, they erase the Constitution that eighteenth-century Americans in fact created. By understanding how originalism fails, we can better understand the Constitution that we have.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Jonathan Gienapp is associate professor of history and law at Stanford University. He has published widely on the Constitution in American life and is the author of the prizewinning The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Yale University Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 030028487X
• ISBN 13: 9780300284874
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible