America's Constitution: A Biography [Paperback]

Akhil Reed Amar (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 12, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0812972724 | ISBN-13: 978-0812972726 | Edition: Reprint

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. You can read the U.S. Constitution, including its 27 amendments, in about a half-hour, but it takes decades of study to understand how this blueprint for our nation's government came into existence. Amar, a 20-year veteran of the Yale Law School faculty, has that understanding, steeped in the political history of the 1780s, when dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation led to a constitutional convention in Philadelphia, which produced a document of wonderful compression and balance creating an indissoluble union.Amar examines in turn each article of the Constitution, explaining how the framers drew on English models, existing state constitutions and other sources in structuring the three branches of the federal government and defining the relationship of the that government to the states.Amar takes on each of the amendments, from the original Bill of Rights to changes in the rules for presidential succession. The book squarely confronts America's involvement with slavery, which the original Constitution facilitated in ways the author carefully explains.Scholarly, reflective and brimming with ideas, this book is miles removed from an arid, academic exercise in textual analysis. Amar evokes the passions and tumult that marked the Constitution's birth and its subsequent revisions. Only rarely do you find a book that embodies scholarship at its most solid and invigorating; this is such a book.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Amar, a Yale Law School professor, approaches the Constitution with a perspective that is both accessible and unconventional. He gets into the formative process of our most revered doctrine of governance by placing it in the context of law, history, and political science. Yet he broadens his focus beyond the Philadelphia constitutional convention to include popular conversation and competing values. Amar views America's foundation as a corporate merger, reflecting 13 colonies with different legal charters and interests. He raises central questions: Was the constitutional process democratic? Was it pro-slavery? He explores the context of the subsequent amendments, initially the Bill of Rights, then those associated with the Reconstruction era through the civil rights era. Amar dares to incorporate contemporary concerns around the amendments that have often prodded us toward achieving our otherwise unrealized ideals. There is a fluidity to Amar's analysis that contrasts with those strict constructionists and those with vested interests in the original intent of our Constitution, as if such ground were sacred. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812972724
• ISBN-13: 978-0812972726
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.4 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Political Science > Constitutions
  • #13 in Books > Law > Constitutional Law

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 106 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A holistic view of the Constitution October 31, 2005

By R. Price

Format:Hardcover

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.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars great intro to the constitution June 2, 2006

By Jon Bornholdt

Format:Hardcover

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.

68 of 78 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Remarkable Achievement September 18, 2005

By Student Of History

Format:Hardcover

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.