Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique by Gienapp, Jonathan

Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique

A detailed and compelling examination of how the legal theory of originalism ignores and distorts the very...
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BD$87.63 BMD
SKU: 9780300265859
Product Type: Books
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Author: Jonathan Gienapp
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: BD$87.63
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Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique by Gienapp, Jonathan

Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique

BD$87.63

Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique

BD$87.63
Author: Jonathan Gienapp
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
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

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.

Author: Jonathan Gienapp
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 09/03/2024
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780300265859

About the Author
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 prize-winning The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era.


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