Amar, Akhil Reed : Yale University

Akhil Reed Amar is Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale. He is the author of scores of articles on constitutional law and criminal procedure, as well as The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles, published by Yale University Press.

�Akhil Amar is one of the most creative thinkers in the legal academy. Not surprisingly, he has produced the best book ever written about what we call the Bill of Rights. He is especially illuminating about the vast differences between the assumptions as to what these amendments meant in 1789 as against their interpretation in 1868, when the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment expected them to be applied against the states.�

--Sanford Levinson, University of Texas, School of Law

�Amar�s argument is nothing short of brilliant: he recasts our understanding of the Bill of Rights in ways that have profound implications. No one presently writing is better able to combine legal and historical analysis.�

--Michael Les Benedict, Ohio State University

"Amar takes us on a historical odyssey . . . [He] offer[s] a striking and original analysis of the political values embodied in the amendments enacted to soothe their concerns. . . . In a rich clause-by clause analysis, Amar elaborates his thesis. . . . Amar's stimulating republican interpretation restores the states and the people to their rightful place in the constitutional story."

--James Henretta, New York Times Book Review

�By viewing the Bill of Rights as a document with an evolving meaning shaped by history, and by stressing how the Civil War and Reconstruction transformed the Bill of Rights, Amar has made a major contribution to the history of American liberties.�

--Eric Foner, Columbia University

�Essential reading for anyone who claims to care about the history of liberty in America, from the ACLU to the NRA, from the NAACP to the Federalist Society. Today�s Bill of Rights, Amar shows, owes less to the Founding Fathers of the 1780s and more to the antislavery crusaders of the 1860s--women alongside men, blacks alongside whites--than many of us had realized.�

--Nadine Strossen, professor, New York Law School and national president, American Civil Liberties Union

�Amar takes us on a historical odyssey.. . . [He] offer[s] a striking and original analysis of the political values embodied in the amendments enacted to soothe their concerns.. . . In a rich clause-by-clause analysis, Amar elaborates his thesis.. . . Amar�s stimulating republican interpretation restores the states and the people to their rightful place in the constitutional story.�

--James Henretta, New York Times Book Review

�There are many virtues to this account. . . The Bill of Rights . . . offers a number of striking arguments and claims, many of them original and convincing. . . [It] is especially valuable as an exercise in intellectual history.�

--Cass R. Sunstein, The New Republic

�Amar�s historical analysis enables the reader to appreciate the countermajoritarian nature of the document over time. . . . He places legal milestones in an understandable perspective.�

--Phillip Young Blue, Library Journal

�Amar is well qualified to present this new look at the nation�s Bill of Rights. . . . [He] contends that the key question to ask about this subject is whether a given provision in the Bill of Rights guarantees a privilege or immunity of individual citizens rather than a right of states or the public at large.�

--R. A. Carp, Choice

�The dazzling culmination of Amar�s attempt, over the past decade, to rethink constitutional law from the ground up, by distinguishing and synthesizing the lessons of the Founding and Reconstruction. This is one of the most important books about constitutional interpretation of its generation.�

--Jeffrey Rosen, American Lawyer

Yale University Press Web Site, April, 2002

Are the deep insights of Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Felix Frankfurter that have defined our cherished Bill of Rights fatally flawed? With meticulous historical scholarship and elegant legal interpretation a leading scholar of Constitutional law boldly answers yes as he explodes conventional wisdom about the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution in this incisive new account of our most basic charter of liberty. Akhil Reed Amar brilliantly illuminates in rich detail not simply the text, structure, and history of individual clauses of the 1789 Bill, but their intended relationships to each other and to other constitutional provisions. Amar's corrective does not end there, however, for as his powerful narrative proves, a later generation of antislavery activists profoundly changed the meaning of the Bill in the Reconstruction era. With the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans underwent a new birth of freedom that transformed the old Bill of Rights.

We have as a result a complex historical document originally designed to protect the people against self-interested government and revised by the Fourteenth Amendment to guard minority against majority. In our continuing battles over freedom of religion and expression, arms bearing, privacy, states' rights, and popular sovereignty, Amar concludes, we must hearken to both the Founding Fathers who created the Bill and their sons and daughters who reconstructed it.


Amar's landmark work invites citizens to a deeper understanding of their Bill of Rights and will set the basic terms of debate about it for modern lawyers, jurists, and historians for years to come.