We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

by Jill Lepore

Unidos marchemos, unidos venceremos, viva la raza! Viva!”

“Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards of progress, emphasizing human dignity and well-being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution.”

The fact that it is so old

Raoul Berger published a blockbuster called Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Berger had during the Watergate crisis published books on Impeachment (1973) and Executive Privilege (1974).

He said no matter how beneficial change is, change by usurpation is the method by which every democratic system has been destroyed.”

Justice William Brennan, in a speech delivered at Georgetown, called the doctrine of original intent “arrogance cloaked as humility” and speculated that proposals endorsing the idea “must inevitably come from persons who have no familiarity with the historical record.”

“Mr. Meese’s version of original intent is a patent fraud on the public,” wrote the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in the Wall Street Journal. “The attorney general uses original intent not as a neutral principle at all but only as a means of getting certain results for the Reagan administration. He is shamelessly selective.”

Biographies range from the decidedly hostile Bruce Allen Murphy, Scalia: Court of One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) to the decidedly fawning James Rosen, Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936–1986 (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2023). The best is Joan Biskupic, American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009).