Ezra's Bookshelf

We the People

by Jill Lepore

HistoryPolitics & GovernmentLaw & Justice

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Jill Lepore offers a new history of the U.S. Constitution for an era when the document has become an object of fierce contestation. Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, traces how the Constitution has been interpreted, contested, and transformed from the founding through the present. She examines not just Supreme Court decisions but the broader cultural and political struggles over constitutional meaning. Lepore writes with narrative drive about the arguments between federalists and anti-federalists, the constitutional crisis of the Civil War, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights, and contemporary battles over originalism. She is critical of originalist methodology while taking seriously the concerns it addresses. The book demonstrates that constitutional meaning has always been contested and that claims to have discovered the founders' singular intent are historically naive. Lepore writes for citizens seeking to understand their own relationship to this governing document. The result is constitutional history that illuminates rather than settles ongoing debates.

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