On Constitution Day, a look back at history

Constitution Day might lack the fireworks and fanfare of its July 4 holiday sibling, but given its  focus on educating the American people about the central legal document that has governed the country for more than 235 years, it holds just as much significance.

Indeed, for Yale Law School Professor Akhil Reed Amar, the federal day of observance easily marks one of the most important moments in history—not just for the United States, but arguably the world. One of the country’s leading constitutional scholars and the author of several Bible-length books on the subject, Amar came to Stanford Law School (SLS) on September 26 for a Constitution Day lecture titled “The Constitution, Originalism, and the Presidency: Questions and Answers.” He also signed copies of his most recent book, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840.

Since 2004, all academic institutions that receive federal funds are mandated by law to host educational events on or near September 17. At Stanford University, the Stanford Constitutional Law Center annually does the honors. SLS Dean George Triantis, Richard E. Lang Professor of Law, and Michael McConnell, Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, director of the Constitutional Law Center, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, provided welcome remarks that underscored the importance of the day.

McConnell explained the “unique place” in American constitutional scholarship that Amar, his friend for approximately 40 years, occupies.

“Akhil is a self-styled originalist—this is the point of view that the Constitution needs to be understood and interpreted in light of its original history and understanding at the time,” McConnell said. “He is also a self-styled liberal progressive politically. In these days of ours, with increasing polarization on so many dimensions, it is often thought that to be an originalist you have to be right wing, and to be a liberal progressive you have to reject a historical approach to the interpretation of the Constitution. So, Akhil is living, breathing proof that those things are not true.”

‘The hinge of human history’

Amar explained to the approximately 240 attendees the importance of the moment, on September 17, 1787, when the Constitutional Convention shared its draft document with the public. “This proposed Constitution was put to a series of votes up and down the continent—‘We the people’ did, in actual fact, ordain and establish a Constitution,” he said. “In that process, more people were allowed to vote on how they and their posterity would be governed than had ever been allowed to vote on anything before in the history of planet Earth—by a very wide margin.” 

“I call it ‘the hinge of human history,’” Amar continued, “the year that changed everything, this year of origin.” Before the U.S. Constitution, a handful of countries and people had, for fleeting moments, enjoyed self-governing societies, he said. But the U.S. Constitution put the world on the trajectory toward billions of people eventually living under democratic rule.

Amar took the audience through an analysis of the U.S. presidency from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, arguing that “an astonishing pattern snaps into focus.” In each election, “the new nation chose a man who in one way or another powerfully and accurately, not merely vacuously or implausibly, reminded his fellow Americans of their core origins as a people, as embodied in the 1776 Declaration and the 1787 Constitution.” 

The new nation was not just proud of, but “obsessed by” its founding, he said. “Americans repeatedly chose presidents who, in one way or another, often in multiple ways, both consciously and subliminally, powerfully reminded their countrymen of propositions and personalities that were in fact at the heart of the 1776 Declaration and the 1787 Constitution.”

While he focused more on the history of the U.S. presidency and the Constitution, Amar wove into his presentation, and the subsequent Q&A with a standing-room only audience, his distinctive vision of originalism: text-based, and historically grounded, but taking into account the evolving understanding of equality and justice. Amar said that the Framers were forward-thinking and that the Constitution was designed to evolve, particularly through its amendments. But not every right can be grounded in the Constitution. Roe v. Wade was, for example, poorly reasoned and wrongly decided, he said.  

Amar repeatedly underscored the importance of understanding history.

“If you don’t know your history, if you don’t know your Constitution, how are you going to do your job in November?” he said. “The only thing, my friends, the only thing that we Americans have in common is our Constitution and the story behind it.”