Praise for
Against Constitutional Originalism

“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

“This is a critically important book about how our Constitution is read. It shakes the foundation of current practice to its core, and its conclusions will take time to be accepted by judges and lawyers. But the book will eventually change fundamentally the practice of constitutional jurisprudence. When it does, it will allow our law to become more democratically accountable—to the people who enact our laws, not the ancestors in our constitutional tradition.”

—Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School

“Against Constitutional Originalism is the most important book in constitutional theory since John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust.”

—Benjamin C. Zipursky, Fordham University School of Law

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.

More Praise for Against Constitutional Originalism

  • "[T]his brilliant book is...the most forceful objection to originalism to date, and it offers a radically new understanding of the intriguingly unfamiliar territory that is our nation’s past."

    — Cass Sunstein, Washington Post

  • “Against Constitutional Originalism . . . injects a fresh, powerful new argument against originalism into the debate.”

    — Andrew Lanham, New Republic

  • “This book is a crucial intervention in the long-running discourse about a method of constitutional interpretation that has gained ascendancy in recent years. Gienapp’s persuasive pushback should be read by all who are concerned about the future of American constitutional law and the American Republic.”

    — Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University

  • “Just when you thought that surely there is nothing new or interesting to say about originalism, along comes Jonathan Gienapp. Against Constitutional Originalism is a must-read. For anyone new to the debates, it provides a comprehensive presentation of the arguments on all sides. For those already familiar, he takes the debate in a new direction that is a level deeper and more foundational. In so doing, he puts advocates of the theory into a conundrum that must force some kind of reconsideration.”

    — Larry Kramer, author of The People Themselves

  • “Professor Gienapp offers a new and devastating critique of originalism. Approaching originalism as an historian, he powerfully shows that originalism is a ‘contrived modern legal fiction’ that cannot be justified based on the original Constitution.”

    — Erwin Chemerinsky, author of Worse Than Nothing

  • “Arguably the most important book written against originalist methodology. Originalists in the academy have little choice but to pay attention to it and respond to its charges. Gienapp . . . has emerged as one of [originalism’s] ablest critics.”

    — Aaron N. Coleman, Law & Liberty

  • "[A] pathbreaking book...Gienapp has dramatically altered the terms of the debate."

    — Jud Campbell, Boston University Law Review

  • "Gienapp’s book is an overdue challenge not simply to originalists but to the standard approach of the community of constitutional scholars, judges, and lawyers.”

    — Stephen Griffin, Constitutional Commentary

  • "[A] splendid new book...[that] presents the case that its title announces."

    — Alison LaCroix, Boston University Law Review

Book Talks and Events

History and Originalism: A Troubled Relationship

For or Against Constitutional Originalism?: A Debate

History v. Originalism: Lofgren Lecture in Constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna College

The Crisis of History in U.S. Constitutional Interpretation: Keynote: 2024 Bissel-Heyd Symposium: American Constitutionalism in Crisis?

Podcasts

Strict Scrutiny

The Loopcast

New Books Network