87 of 92 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A holistic view of the Constitution, October 31, 2005
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.
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great intro to the constitution, June 2, 2006
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.
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