| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

H. Jefferson Powell. A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. Pp. x, 251. $35.00.
Historians weary of pestering colleagues in politics, philosophy, and law about the need to take account of historical context will be pleased that H. Jefferson Powell has joined the effort with his new book. In what the dust jacket claims is a "powerful new approach," Powell seeks to demonstrate how constitutional arguments and outcomes are shaped by historical circumstances and politics, what he calls a "historicist" interpretation of constitutional law (p. 7). So far, so good.	1
Powell's approach is to set out a series of constitutional conflicts, using a variation of the traditional case method. His examples start with the earliest years of the republic and go up to 1944. These vignettes are written in a lively and readable fashion and meant to focus on how things are said, as much as what was said. The examples, unusually, include some cases from state courts. The reader will find well-known national debates like that over the Alien and Sedition Act and a national bank, as well as less familiar state cases on slavery and judicial review. Together they provide a fascinating account of some of the significant controversies that drove and shaped constitutional interpretation and government over the years. The founders were involved in some of the earliest of these controversies and worried, Powell reminds us, that the Constitution's plain language would be construed away.	. . .

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