Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique

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 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.