Letter of the Law

Akhil Amar is one of those scholars who rarely leaves home without a pocket-size copy of the Constitution secreted about his person (presumably safe from any "unreasonable searches and seizures"). One suspects that in stray moments--waiting for takeoff, in checkout lines at the supermarket--he likes nothing better than to whip out his copy and mull over some obscure clause. And as his newest book makes clear, he finds much there to mull. At nearly 500 pages of text and more than 100 of notes (many substantive), this is a work for the long-distance reader. Indeed, in its very length, America's Constitution illustrates the inverse relation between the brevity of the document and its potential for voluminous exposition.

At fewer than 8,000 words, ours is a textual lightweight next to most other constitutions, including the turgid "constitutional treaty" of the European Union that French and Dutch voters recently doomed. Midway through its twenty-second decade, the Constitution is also the oldest such national document in continuous existence. American constitutionalism is distinctive in one further respect. In no other country has the practice of constitutional law and the production of constitutional scholarship become so elaborate, refined, disputatious and even cultic. Our obsession with the Constitution--its origins, evolution and especially its interpretation--has no parallel anywhere else in the world.

The literary economy and historical durability of the Constitution support this hermeneutical obsession in obvious ways. Brevity invites and indeed requires interpretation to connect the clauses, fill in the silences and search for meanings beyond the four corners of the text. The sheer fact of longevity, meanwhile, has endowed numerous clauses with interpretive histories of their own. Other provisions, like impeachment, operate as sleeper clauses, lying dormant for decades, then exploding into prominence and demanding interpretation.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.