Book Review

Bruce Ackerman's We the People probes three epochs in American constitutional history: the founding, Reconstruction, and the New Deal. From these case studies he draws two lessons. First, the Article 5 amending process has been historically inadequate to the task of adapting the Constitution to new circumstances. For example, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment winked at Article 5 when they required the former Confederate states to ratify the amendment as a condition of readmission to the Union. During the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt so successfully marshaled popular support to create the modern social welfare state that even the Supreme Court capitulated in 1937. The genius of the American Constitution has been the capacity of the people, acting through their political leaders, to achieve transformative constitutional change despite, rather than because of, Article 5.

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Ackerman's other major conclusion is that the Constitution is best understood as a living, historical document. It has had a life of its own with adjustments, large and small, made beyond anything the Framers imagined. We can argue about whether the Constitution should be interpreted based on their intentions, but no amount of arguing will change the historical fact that change and adaptation, not strict fidelity to the Framers' intentions, have been its hallmarks.

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