Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique
Jonathan Gienapp
Sep 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Josh Innerst
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11 hr 37 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory's core tenet-that the United States 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 United States 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.
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 prizewinning The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era.
Josh Innerst is an accomplished classical stage actor and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. He continues to pursue his craft in film/TV and is currently based in the Midwest with his family. When he's not onstage or on-set, he spends his days in the booth or out putzing in the garden.
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