Description

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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

About the Author

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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.

Praise For…

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“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