Quotes from Akhil Reed Amar

The people may change the constitutions whenever and however they please," explained Wilson. "It is a power paramount to every constitution, inalienable in its nature.

In the near term, such compromises made possible a continental union of North and South that provided bountiful benefits to freeborn Americans. But in the long run, the Founders' failure to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction would lead to massive military conflict on American soil—the very sort of conflict whose avoidance was, as we shall now see, literally the primary purpose of the Constitution of 1788.

The written Constitution cannot work as intended without something outside of it—America's unwritten Constitution—to fill in its gaps and to stabilize it. In

Improved reporting practices have enabled the Court to get its message out, and quickly. Nowadays, in any given case a majority of justices ordinarily sign on to a single "Opinion of the Court," an opinion widely viewed as the last word on the Constitution's meaning. Meanwhile, a partisan and crumbly Congress has often found it hard to speak with one voice, and presidents have come to be seen as party politicians rather than impartial magistrates.

Indeed, these lenses and compasses are perhaps the most important components of America's unwritten Constitution, and they form the organizational spine of this book. Fair

Howsoever we classify enactment arguments—whether we view them as historical, or textual, or structural—we need to see that the written Constitution and the unwritten Constitution cohere to form a single system. While

the people may undoubtedly change the government, not because it is ill exercised, but because they conceive another form will be more conducive to their welfare.

Americans rewarded George Washington with the presidency. Indeed, the Electoral College unanimously backed Washington in 1789; every single elector who participated cast a vote for America's George. By installing Washington by acclamation, Americans in effect consented yet again—truly, deeply—to the Constitution that was now inextricably intertwined with Washington himself.

The key that unlocks the door is the simple idea that no clause of the Constitution exists in textual isolation. We must read the document as a whole. Doing so will enable us to detect larger structures of meaning—rules

Yorktown, where friendly French soldiers and sailors had outnumbered American ground troops more than two to one.

the first global war began in 1754 with the killing of a French Canadian officer in America's backcountry. The slaying of Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville on May 28, 1754, forty miles south of the Forks of the Ohio (modern-day Pittsburgh), occurred at the hands of colonial and Indian fighters led by a young Virginia officer named George Washington.

From the British point of view, who better to pay than colonists, who had been the war's beneficiaries? The war, after all, had eliminated a major threat to British America. From the colonial point of view, why should colonists pay for a British shield that they no longer needed?

Uniquely in the history of the world, Americans in the late eighteenth century constituted themselves as a people and as a nation in a series of epic and self-conscious acts of democratic self-invention. In 1776, thirteen British North American colonies renounced their common parent and created what would later become the world's mightiest power.

in 1775 there arose a remarkable civic society that aimed to end slavery itself. The society was formed not by Johnson, nor in Johnson's vaunted London, nor indeed anywhere in Britain proper, but rather in Philadelphia, the host city of the Continental Congress. Two of the society's early leaders were Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, who both, in the summer of 1776, added their names to the American Declaration of Independence.

the most remarkable features of these first state constitutions were certain overarching elements that are now so commonplace that we forget how truly revolutionary they were in 1776: writtenness, concision, replicability, rights declaration, democratic pedigree, republican structure, and amendability. Never before in history had this particular combination of features come together.