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Americans refer to “the Constitution” easily and often. What exactly they mean is not so clear much of the time.

The term is, of course, short for “The Constitution of the United States of America,” which is the title of a document – really, a collection of documents, the original text and the amendments. In some sense, Americans always have the document in the back of their minds when they invoke its title. In ceremonial contexts, and when politicians want to belabor their opponents about the latter’s supposed perfidy, “the Constitution” brings up the image of the parchment document housed in the National Archives, with “We the People” in large flowing script at the beginning and George Washington’s signature leading the rest at the end; what the document actually says between heading and signatures is often immaterial.

Americans often think about constitutional law in terms of high-profile decisions by the Supreme Court – decisions that divide the justices by ideology, not law. This focus often leads to the erroneous conclusion that constitutional law arguments are, and can only be, political in substance. In The Practice of American Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell demonstrates that there is a longstanding, shared practice of constructing and evaluating constitutional law claims that transcends current political disagreements. Powell describes how lawyers and judges identify constitutional problems by using a specifiable method of inquiry that enables them to agree on what the questions are, and thus what any plausible answer must address, even when disagreement over the most persuasive answers remains. Rather than being simply politics by other means, constitutional law is the successful practice of giving substance to the Constitution as supreme law.

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Introduction

Summary

The Practice of American Constitutional Law

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Introduction

Summary

The Practice of American Constitutional Law