Whose Constitution Do We Actually Live In? (LAW-CONST2)

When the written Constitution is ambiguous, Akhil Reed Amar argues, the symbolic texts fill the gaps. He walks through six of them and what each still decides today.

This lecture shows the Declaration's "no taxation without representation" at work in McCulloch and the dormant commerce clause, the Federalist Papers confirming national security as a founding purpose, and the Northwest Ordinance's anti-colonial principle bearing on questions like Puerto Rican statehood. Amar then reads the Fourteenth Amendment's "born equal" through the Gettysburg Address, contrasts desegregation with the fuller integration of Brown and King's dream, and argues we live in Lincoln's Constitution, not Jefferson's.