
Against Constitutional Originalism
A Historical Critique
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Narrated by:
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Josh Innerst
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By:
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Jonathan Gienapp
About this listen
Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory's core tenet—that the United States Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning—has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the distant constitutional past. Yet originalist engagement with history is often deeply problematic. And now that a majority of justices on the United States Supreme Court champion originalism, the task of scrutinizing originalists' use and abuse of history has never been more urgent.
In this comprehensive and novel critique of originalism, Jonathan Gienapp targets originalists' unspoken assumptions about the Constitution and its history. Originalists are committed to recovering the Constitution laid down at the American Founding, yet they often assume that the Constitution is fundamentally modern. Rather than recovering the original Constitution, they project their own understandings onto it, assuming that eighteenth-century constitutional thinking was no different than their own. They take for granted what it meant to write a constitution down, what law was, how it worked, and where it came from, and how a constitution's meaning was fixed. In the process, they erase the Constitution that eighteenth-century Americans in fact created. By understanding how originalism fails, we can better understand the Constitution that we have.
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- By: Thubten Chodron, His Holiness the Dalai Lama - foreword
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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This user’s guide to Buddhist basics takes the most commonly asked questions - beginning with “What is the essence of the Buddha’s teachings?” - and provides simple answers in plain English. Thubten Chodron’s responses to the questions that always seem to arise among people approaching Buddhism make this an exceptionally complete and accessible introduction - as well as a manual for living a more peaceful, mindful, and satisfying Life.
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Amazing introduction to Buddhism
- By chad d on 07-02-15
By: Thubten Chodron, and others
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I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t)
- Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power
- By: Brené Brown
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on seven years of ground-breaking research and hundreds of interviews, I Thought It Was Just Me shines a long-overdue light on an important truth: Our imperfections are what connect us to each other and to our humanity. Our vulnerabilities are not weaknesses; they are powerful reminders to keep our hearts and minds open to the reality that we're all in this together.
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I'm sure its great if you are a mother ....
- By Leslie A Hill on 08-09-11
By: Brené Brown
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Eight Dates
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- By: John Gottman PhD, Julie Schwartz Gottman PhD, Doug Abrams, and others
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin, Julie McKay
- Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins
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Navigating the challenges of long-term commitment takes effort - and it just got simpler, with this empowering, step-by-step guide to communicating about the things that matter most to you and your partner. Drawing on 40 years of research from their world-famous Love Lab, Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman invite couples on eight fun, easy, and profoundly rewarding dates, each one focused on a make-or-break issue: trust, conflict, sex, money, family, adventure, spirituality, and dreams.
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What the F. Robot-reader???!?!?!
- By Anonymous User on 01-21-20
By: John Gottman PhD, and others
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Common ground is hard to find in today’s politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives, many people have grown frustrated under a system of government that constantly demands compromise. More and more on both the right and the left have come to blame the Constitution for the resulting discord. But the Constitution is not the problem we face; it is the solution. Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, conservative scholar Yuval Levin’s American Covenant recovers the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines.
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The Price of Power
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In The Price of Power, award-winning journalist Michael Tackett pulls back the curtain on one of the most influential figures to ever set foot in the American Senate, offering you an intimate, personal view of his life and career. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, letters, and more than 100 interviews with associates, colleagues, and McConnell himself, Tackett pieces together the story of McConnell’s early life, his formative battle with polio as a young child, and details his forty-plus-year career as one of the Senate’s most impactful leaders.
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WOW
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Law School for Everyone: Constitutional Law
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Americans wage many of today’s fiercest policy debates and culture wars over constitutional meaning. It’s because constitutional law is so fundamental to our democracy that law schools across the country teach the subject. It's the area of law that determines what federal and state governments are permitted to do, and what rights you have as an individual citizen of the US. Here, you'll get the same accessible, well-rounded introduction to constitutional law as a typical law student - but with the added benefit of noted constitutional scholar Eric Berger's brilliant insights.
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Read with this Neil Gorsuch!
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Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
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For decades, American politics has been plagued by a breakdown between the Democratic and Republican parties, in which victory has inevitably led to defeat and vice versa. Both parties have lost sight of the people at the center of the American electorate, leading to polarization and paralysis. In Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira reveal the tectonic changes shaping the country’s current political landscape that both pundits and political scientists have missed.
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Tone Deaf Dems
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What listeners say about Against Constitutional Originalism
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- Terrance
- 09-28-24
Title of my review
This was a good book. I liked this book very much. On an axis tracking the goodness of books, where leftward is more bad and rightward is more good, a vector representing this book would need to be placed to the right, if we intended for the vector representation of the book to be accurate with respect to my own assessment of this book. This was a good book. Thank you, I love you all.
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- marwalk
- 11-24-24
Constitutional Originalism is judicial chicanery
Constitutional Originalism is actually a modern theory crafted to prop up right wing judicial chicanery—this is revealed by the exhaustive survey of the Founding era Jonathan Gienapp presents in this book. Gienapp searches out the true sense of what the US Constitution meant to the people who lived in 1787, and the context that guided its practical application in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. Contrary to what modern Originalists would have people believe, the living constitution concept is more original (that is, true to the Founders' intent) than the Originalism theory in our contemporary time.
Gienapp lays bare the contradictory logic employed by Originalists in their attempts to discern the meaning of the Constitution solely from the text itself—the author illustrates repeatedly how Originalists fold their own reasoning back onto itself, and end up themselves unwittingly making the case for a living Constitution. Originalists slights of hand with the text do them no favors, such as their tendency to ignore the Constitution's Preamble and its emphasis on "We the People." Gienapp demonstrates that the text can only be understood in its Eighteenth Century meaning, the context of which Originalists lose altogether by interpreting the words in the Constitution through a modern day perspective that was unheard of in 1787.
Although many significant advancements in human rights were achieved by the Warren Court of the 1960s (over and against recalcitrant legislatures), an opposite Court now is in place—and taking legislative initiative may be the way forward in the 21st Century. As US Courts become increasingly right wing with more judicial benches stacked with Originalist activists, Gienapp's observations that the Founders considered actual policy decisions to be in the political realm of the legislature is a point worth rediscovering—and acting upon.
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- J. Peter Coll, Jr.
- 01-31-25
Turgid Treatise
I found the book pedantic - long on repetition and short on supporting historical evidence or examples.
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