Stanford historian Jonathan Gienapp’s new book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique, is an important shot across the bow of a venerable legal tradition. Using the tools of a historian, Gienapp aims to draw the methods of public meaning originalism into question. In this symposium, Law & Liberty contributors offer responses from both legal and historical perspectives.
Jan 16, 2025 A Review of Against Constitutional Originalism
Originalism, Relativism, and the American Founding
Gienapp’s new book is a serious historical attack on originalism, but it falls short of vanquishing it entirely.
Jan 16, 2025 A Review of Against Constitutional Originalism
John O. McGinnis & Mike Rappaport
Jonathan Gienapp seeks to use the historian’s tools to challenge originalism, but in the process he neglects the text of the Constitution itself.
Originalism, Relativism, and the American Founding
Jonathan Gienapp’s Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique does not come to praise originalism but to bury it. Far from a polemic or a screed, however, Gienapp has produced a profoundly considerate, sustained, and critical attack upon the methodology of public meaning originalism. The result is arguably the most important book written against originalist methodology. Originalists in the academy have little choice but to pay attention to it and respond to its charges.
Gienapp, a specialist in eighteenth-century history at Stanford University, is no stranger to critiquing originalism. In recent years, he has emerged as one of its ablest critics. His first book, The Second Creation, focused on eighteenth-century constitutionalism and sought to recover the Founders’ constitutional thinking when they created written constitutions, and the 1787 Constitution in particular. He argued there that the essential meanings and understandings originalists associate with the Constitution emerged from the political conflicts of the 1790s rather than pre-existing in the decades before 1787. Against Constitutional Originalism is Second Creation’s spiritual successor. Unlike that first book, however, Gienapp’s focus shifts to intellectual history and historical methodology; Against Constitutional Originalism is more a discussion of historical methods and how they help recover the past interpretations compared to originalist methodologies.