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Illustration of the Constitution, with the hand of a Founder writing with a feather, and the other side a 21st century hand writing with a pen.

The Supreme Court’s Originalists Are Fundamentally Wrong About History

The Founders didn’t believe the Constitution had a fixed meaning. So why do so many of the justices?
by Andrew Lanham via The New Republic on October 7, 2024
U.S. Constitution

This Book Could Change the Way Conservatives Read the Constitution

“Against Constitutional Originalism” by historian Jonathan Gienapp could fundamentally reorient how we understand America’s founding.
by Cass R. Sunstein via Washington Post on September 25, 2024
"We the People" collage.

Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?

Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on September 23, 2024
Barack Obama speaking in front of a museum exhibit titled "Writing the Constitution."

The Constitution and the American Left

A culture of reverence for the U.S. Constitution shields the founding document from criticism, despite its many shortcomings.
by Aziz Rana via Dissent on July 19, 2024
Chief Justice John Roberts.

The Supreme Court Has Murdered the Constitution

America’s founding document is now an all-but-meaningless scrap of paper. Happy Fourth!
by Ryan Cooper via The American Prospect on July 4, 2024
Sections of the US Constitution torn to be used as pennants.

Is the United States Too Devoted to the Constitution?

A new book argues that worship of the Constitution has distorted our politics.
by John Fabian Witt via The New Republic on June 24, 2024
James Madison by Gilbert Stewart, 1821.

How the Constitution Unifies the Country

Yuval Levin urges us to take America’s greatest constitutional thinker, James Madison, as our lodestar.
by Marc Landy via Law & Liberty on June 11, 2024
Aziz Rana.

Aziz Rana Wants Us to Stop Worshipping the Constitution

A conversation with the legal scholar on why it is unusual that the Constitution is core to American national identity.
by Aziz Rana, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins via The Nation on June 3, 2024
A rally for the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention hosted by the Black Panthers.

Democracy Was a Decolonial Project

For generations of American radicals, the path to liberation required a new constitution, not forced removal.
by Aziz Rana via Boston Review on May 30, 2024
Side-by-side photographs of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

On Garrison, Douglass, and American Colonialism

Examining how William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass interpreted the nation's relationship with the Constitution.
by Maggie Blackhawk via LPE Project on April 22, 2024
Engraving of "We the People," in which the words "We" and "the" are painted over.

How Do We Survive the Constitution?

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.
by Corey Robin via The New Yorker on October 4, 2023
Abraham Lincoln.

The Two Constitutions

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.
by David W. Blight via New York Review of Books on May 18, 2023
A painting of the American Founders at the Constitutional Convention.

Inventing American Constitutionalism

On "Power and Liberty," a condensed version of Gordon Wood's entire sweep of scholarship about constitutionalism.
by Gordon S. Wood, Brian A. Smith via Law & Liberty on March 10, 2023
An American flag stylized as a ball bearing maze.

The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

How our inability to change America’s most important document is deforming our politics and government.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on October 26, 2022
Graphic design of a red, fractured United States on a yellow background

There Is Absolutely Nothing to Support the ‘Independent State Legislature’ Theory

Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution.
by J. Michael Luttig via The Atlantic on October 3, 2022
Painting of the drafters if the U.S. Constitution

A Colorblind Compromise?

“Colorblindness,” an ideology that denies race as an organizing principle of the nation’s structural order, reaches back to the drafting of the US Constitution.
by Matthew Wills, Kasey Henricks via JSTOR Daily on September 9, 2022
Artwork of Congress on July 4, 1776

Eighteenth Century Track Changes: Uncovering Revisions in Founding Fathers’ Documents

Let’s consider the significance and responsibility of outlining, drafting, and shaping our nation as the Founding Fathers put pen to paper.
by Tana Villafana via Library of Congress Blog on July 7, 2022
Two people wearing sunglasses peeking over a fence

Privacy Isn't in the Constitution – But It's Everywhere in Constitutional Law

The Supreme Court has found protections for people’s privacy in several constitutional amendments – and used it as a basis for some fundamental protections.
by Scott Skinner-Thompson via The Conversation on June 15, 2022
Artistic collage of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

Was Emancipation Constitutional?

Did the Confederacy have a constitutional right to secede? And did Lincoln violate the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves?
by James Oakes via New York Review of Books on April 20, 2022
A close up picture of the beginning of the U.S. Constitution

The Constitution Was Meant to Guard Against Oligarchy

A new book aims to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality.
by Chris Lehmann via The New Republic on February 10, 2022
The National Archive rotunda, Washington, D.C.

Why Americans Worship the Constitution

The veneration of the Constitution is directly connected to America’s emergence as global hegemon.
by Aziz Rana via Public Seminar on October 11, 2021
Painting of Lincoln and his cabinet by M.S. Carpenter, 1863.

Did the Constitution Pave the Way to Emancipation?

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.
by Richard Kreitner via The Nation on October 6, 2021
William Burnet meeting with Native American leadership

The Native American Roots of the U.S. Constitution

The Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, and other political formations generally separated military and civil leadership and guarded certain personal freedoms.
by Robert J. Miller, Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily on September 15, 2021
Picture of the "Words That Made Us."

Context and Consequences

On Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us,” a new history of America’s constitutional conversation.
by Joel Seligman via Los Angeles Review of Books on August 3, 2021
Silhouette with pieces of constitutions and other prints inside

When Constitutions Took Over the World

Was this new age spurred by the ideals of the Enlightenment or by the imperatives of global warfare?
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on March 22, 2021
"We the People"; US Constitution

It Would Be Great if the United States Were Actually a Democracy

The pervasive mythmaking about the supposed wisdom of the founders has covered up a central truth: the US Constitution is an antidemocratic mess.
by Aziz Rana, Chris Maisano via Jacobin on February 16, 2021
Wallpaper printed in support of the Constitutional Union Party’s presidential candidate, John Bell, in 1860.

A Constitution of Freedom

During the 1860 presidential election, political parties dueled over the intent of the framers.
by James Oakes via Lapham’s Quarterly on January 20, 2021

The Flawed Genius of the Constitution

The document counted my great-great-grandfather as 3/5 of a free person. But the Framers don’t own the version we live by today. We do.
by Danielle Allen via The Atlantic on September 17, 2020
Smudged and revised copy of the Constitution.

The Constitution Is the Crisis

The system is rigged, and it’s the Constitution that’s doing the rigging.
by Sanford Levinson via The Atlantic on October 1, 2019

The Fourth Battle for the Constitution

The latest struggle to define America's founding charter will define the country for generations to come.
by Jeffrey Rosen via The Atlantic on September 25, 2019
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