| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Akhil Reed Amar. The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction. Paperback edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 412. $17.95.

Akhil Reed Amar's brilliant study of the American Bill of Rights demonstrates that, despite two hundred years of intense scrutiny, fresh insights can be unearthed from a document deeply encrusted with glosses upon glosses. Amar's originality lies in his two distinct lines of attack. First, he reminds us that "our constitution is a single document, and not a jumble of disconnected clauses," a fact easily lost sight of in the "clausebound approach" that dominates modern constitutional scholarship as well as law school education (p. 125). Insisting that the document is more than its parts, Amar points out how much is lost in the clausebound approach: it "misses the ways in which structure and rights mutually reinforce. It misses interesting questions within amendments . . . It misses thematic continuities across different amendments . . . It misses the many linkages between the original constitution and the Bill" (p. 125). His holistic vision goes a long way to provide these missing elements. . . .

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