{"id":26331,"date":"2025-09-16T19:09:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T19:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/26331\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T19:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T19:09:09","slug":"jill-lepore-its-so-hard-to-amend-the-constitution-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/26331\/","title":{"rendered":"Jill Lepore: \u2018It\u2019s so hard to amend the constitution\u2019 | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her new book, the Harvard history professor and New Yorker writer<\/a> Jill Lepore makes a 600-page case for the US constitution as a living document, made to be amended by each generation.<\/p>\n

Lepore said her book, We the People, is also \u201ca deep historical critique of originalism\u201d, the conservative legal theory that dominates the supreme court, deep political polarization having rendered constitutional amendments all but politically impossible.<\/p>\n

Among originalists, only the views of those who wrote the constitution in Philadelphia in 1787 should be used to divine constitutional meaning, even 250 years later in a country of cars, planes, automatic weapons, AI, rights for women and minorities and all the founders did not know.<\/p>\n

To Lepore, as to many scholars<\/a>, that is clearly absurd.<\/p>\n

\u201cOriginalism is a weird bucket that contains multitudes,\u201d Lepore said, from her study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. \u201cBut among the more simplistic versions of originalism is the insistence that this is how the constitution was written and was meant to be read from the very beginning: that you can only refer to James Madison\u2019s constitution itself, Madison\u2019s notes, the notes of the ratifying convention, the Federalist Papers, and that\u2019s pretty much it.<\/p>\n

\u201cMadison\u2019s notes, like everyone else\u2019s notes, were not published until 1840. He died in 1837. Everybody took a 50-year vow of secrecy, and you weren\u2019t supposed to say what happened at the Constitutional Convention because it wasn\u2019t supposed to matter [regarding] how to interpret the constitution.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ratifying convention debates, some were published soon after the [state] conventions. They\u2019re not especially definitive, not full accounts. The Federalist Papers<\/a>\u201d \u2013 essays on the constitution, written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay \u2013 \u201cwere published really only in New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788. They were not widely read outside New York \u2026 they\u2019re not really cited by the supreme court for a very long time.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the idea that there is this primary text of historical documents that from the beginning were used to read the constitution is just not a defensible position.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless, the originalist justices proceed, removing rights, facilitating a lawless president. As they do, they might consider a minor but potent irony, presented by Lepore.<\/p>\n

In 1982, conservative students from Yale and Chicago founded the Federalist Society<\/a>, a group that would become an engine of originalist thought, five of six current rightwing justices among its paid-up members. For a logo, the group chose Madison\u2019s silhouette. But the Federalists were not true to their originalist creed. Finding Madison\u2019s silhouette displeasing, they amended it<\/a>, to give him a nicer nose.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really wanted to put the nose in there,\u201d Lepore said, laughing. \u201cIf you look at the logo of the Federalist Society, Madison just looks classically handsome. And I think Madison was, like, about 5ft tall, and he didn\u2019t have an especially attractive profile. I greatly admire Madison. We all have physical faults. But that was one funny detail. I think it was Robert Bork\u2019s son who said, \u2018Let\u2019s just tidy him up.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Madison\u2019s actual nose was scarred by frostbite<\/a>. Bork, a formidable judge and jurist, was scarred by a failed supreme court nomination in 1987, under Ronald Reagan. He died<\/a> in 2012, four years before another originalist titan, justice Antonin Scalia<\/a>. Their ghosts hover still.<\/p>\n

Former vice-president Mike Pence addresses a Federalist Society event in Washington DC Photograph: Drew Angerer\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In any circumstance, a new Lepore book is big news. In 2018 she enjoyed bestselling success with These Truths<\/a>, an inclusive American history. We the People looks and reads like a sequel, though there have been two books in between: If\/Then<\/a>, a history of early computing, and The Deadline<\/a>, a collection of essays.<\/p>\n

Since 2023, Lepore has been a faculty member<\/a> at Harvard Law School as well as a history professor. As she \u201cstarted doing more teaching of constitutional history\u201d, she found she \u201cwanted resources to use. Particularly, I really wanted a data set of every attempt to amend the constitution, and there wasn\u2019t one, so I ended up starting a research project with a team of students to build it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Up and running, the Amendments Project<\/a> offers a searchable archive. As it says: \u201conly 27 amendments to the US constitution have ever been ratified\u201d, which makes it \u201can archive of failures\u201d. Lepore prefers to emphasize \u201cthe study of possibility\u201d, which she finds \u201cvery energizing for students.<\/p>\n

\u201cYoung people, whatever political persuasion, just don\u2019t have a lot of sense of possibility as a generation. So it\u2019s really fun to think about, even as we were looking at failed possibilities. And then I thought, \u2018Well, maybe what I should do is just write a history of the constitution through this lens.\u2019 I had come to believe, in studying people who studied failed amendments, there is a real story there. It\u2019s so hard to amend the constitution. If you look at efforts to do it, you just see this really big, colorful canvas of contestation, which is narratively rich and politically important.\u201d<\/p>\n

We the People contains compelling accounts of the constitutional convention, the road to ratification, the Reconstruction<\/a> amendments after the civil war, the 19th amendment<\/a> securing votes for women, the rise of the reactionary right and the slow death of the amendment process. The machinations of the Trump court and the strange fate of the Equal Rights Amendment, which Joe Biden failed to revive<\/a>, bring the tale to the present.<\/p>\n

As ever, Lepore writes with literary flair, offering striking character studies, often of Americans who fought for change but are now largely forgotten. John Jones<\/a> and Mary Jane Richardson Jones<\/a>, for example, were free Black abolitionists in pre-civil war Chicago.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody knows Frederick Douglass<\/a>,\u201d Lepore said. \u201cAt all these [Black political] conventions where often John Jones was vice president of the convention, Douglass was president. Douglass was a much better speaker, a famed orator, and had a very colorful life story and was such a statesman, and John Jones was really a Chicago figure. But I had more to say about John Jones\u2019s wife, Mary Richardson, which is harder to do with Douglass if you want to think about Black women in the abolitionist movement and in the Black convention movement. Jones is a better character to help us see that those roles are largely hidden in the historical record, but are nevertheless important.<\/p>\n

\u201cPaying attention to Black Chicago is useful in that regard. I think we forget about the importance of the free Black fight for privileges and immunities. And that becomes part of the 14th amendment<\/a>\u201d, ratified in 1868, granting equal protection before the law.<\/p>\n

To Lepore, \u201cIf you believe in the US Constitution, you believe the people have the right exclusively to draft and ratify and amend constitutions, then you should be able to see yourself being involved in such a thing.\u2019 Having slightly more ordinary actors, maybe that helps. It\u2019s hard to imagine being Douglass. It\u2019s hard to imagine being Abraham Lincoln. I could probably imagine being John Jones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other players include Victoria Woodhull<\/a>, a bold early suffragist, and Birch Bayh<\/a>, the Indiana Democrat who tried<\/a> to abolish the undemocratic Electoral College. There are figures who fought change, including Mary Guthrie Kilbreth<\/a>, who opposed women\u2019s suffrage, and David J Mays<\/a>, a proto-originalist, a segregationist too.<\/p>\n

Race looms large. Many who wrote the constitution owned enslaved people. The constitution did not mention slavery. The issue festered. In a stunning set-piece set in January 1861, on the brink of war, Lepore describes Francis Lieber, \u201ca curly-haired, Prussian-born professor of history and political science\u201d, lecturing on constitutional law in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Photograph: WW Norton<\/p>\n

In Lepore\u2019s words, Lieber lectured \u201cacross the road from an African burial ground that had closed in 1795 and contained the remains of 15,000 Black New Yorkers who built New York and whose memory was daily being forgotten as the city grew up on top of their graves. Their coffins bore the marks of their beliefs, beads and brass tacks, and their bones bore the marks of their suffering, bowed and broken limbs and musket balls lodged in rib cages. Many had been carried from West Africa; they were buried with hundreds of shells in hopes of going home. \u2018The shells stand for the sea,\u2019 it was said. \u2018The sea brought us, and the sea shall take us away.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The passage powerfully evokes Lepore\u2019s vision of an organic constitution, made from biological matter including blood, sweat and tears.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a few places in the [new] book like that,\u201d Lepore said. \u201cI\u2019m using literary devices to come to the key ideas, right? That\u2019s kind of how I generally work. And sometimes those devices are development, and sometimes they\u2019re plot-related, and sometimes they\u2019re scene-setting.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother place which is a little bit like that Lieber moment is when the supreme court is meeting to discuss Brown v Board of Education<\/a>\u201d \u2013 the 1954 ruling against racial segregation in public schools \u2013 \u201cand the military parade moving the actual parchment Constitution and the Bill of Rights from the Library of Congress to the National Archives is a block away, and they\u2019re going to put it in this basically atomic war-proof underground bunker, which they\u2019ve built to protect the Constitution during the cold war.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope a reader \u2026 can just kind of absorb that scene. What it is to open up the Constitution in the way Brown v Board did and what it is to shut it down, in the way that military parade does, in a sense, or to elevate it to the level of Scripture, or something in a sarcophagus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lepore\u2019s constitution is constructed from \u201cold books and oak trees \u2026 sheepskin and goose feathers\u201d but is nonetheless alive. She hopes it might yet breathe again.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing I loved about Francis Lieber is when he says the Constitution is like a pregnant woman about to give birth,\u201d Lepore said. \u201cAnd, you know, Lincoln talks about the new birth of freedom<\/a>. And I found an illustration of the Constitution with the 14th amendment as a baby. I found that really helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In her new book, the Harvard history professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore makes a 600-page case…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-26331","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}