Review by Choice Review
Many aficionados and readers of history and political science believe that studying the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence is fraught with dates, tedium, and unnecessary details--all resulting in boredom. In his introductory essay and commentary, editor Rakove (Stanford) dispels such stereotypes. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he breathes life into the two founding documents of the US, and arguably into the ideals and beliefs that define America and Americanism. This volume gives students, scholars, practitioners, and general readers an insightful, easily understood, and well-researched narrative political account of how these documents came to be written. Rakove places the colorful personalities of the founding fathers, along with the concepts, issues, and concerns involved with these documents, within an easily discernable context. His attention to historical and political detail is unwavering and on target. Indeed he puts the fun back into reading and learning about the US's two most important documents. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. W. Jakub Franciscan University of Steubenville
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
MISSISSIPPI did not ratify the 13th Amendment, the one that abolished slavery, until 1995. I learned that fact, which calls to mind the adage "better never than late," from Seth Lipsky's entertaining annotation of the Constitution. "The Citizen's Constitution" is a magpie's miscellany of curiosities. It is governed by a newspaperman's sensibility, one more interested in conflict and color than order and synthesis. Lipsky, the former editor of The Forward and the founding editor of The New York Sun, is particularly good on the Constitution's first two articles, which concern Congress and the presidency. He likes rascals and absurdities. Jack N. Rakove takes a more serious and dutiful approach in "The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence." A historian who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution," Rakove is constrained by knowing too much. He seems half-embarrassed by his project, which he says will "probably satisfy neither historians nor constitutional lawyers" but may "engage the lay readers and students for whom these annotations have really been prepared." But those happy amateurs may find themselves squirming a little in the face of sentences like this one about the dual system of congressional representation settled on by the framers: "The famous decision of July 16, which we mistakenly label a compromise and wrongly attribute to Connecticut, had four major consequences." The annotation is a curious genre. The reading experience is by nature unpleasant, with the eye forced to shuttle back and forth between text and commentary. The document under scrutiny is constantly interrupted, its unities dismembered. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of the Constitution, which is too often read as a series of clauses rather than an organic whole. At the same time, there is a great deal to be said for reading every word of the Constitution, and being made to pause and consider each one. Lipsky annotates more often and more vigorously, with eight notes on the Constitution's preamble alone. Rakove is more judicious and magisterial, typically weighing in once at the end of each paragraph. Lipsky makes 310 comments, Rakove just 118. Rakove throws in a bonus annotation, of the Declaration of Independence; a dense introductory essay; a 32-page "calendar of events"; lists of the signers of both documents; and a bunch of not always apt illustrations. It all feels padded. Yet only Lipsky includes footnotes. Lipsky tends to look forward, asking what the consequences of given provisions have been. And he likes concrete facts. He lists the 17 people impeached since the nation's founding, the five formal declarations of war and the four times Congress has authorized the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Rakove is more interested in animating principles than facts on the ground. Consider Article III, Section 1, which says that federal judges "shall hold their offices during good behavior." Lipsky begins by briskly translating "during good behavior" into plain English (it means, he writes, "life tenure"). Then he quotes Alexander Hamilton in defense of the idea. There follows a comment from two law professors who call the modern federal judiciary "a gerontocracy - like the leadership cadre of the Chinese Communist Party." Lipsky adds statistics - the average Supreme Court justice before 1970 served about 15 years, since then more than 25. Rakove is more punctilious and formal. His definition of "during good behavior" is carefully hedged ("which we casually but not inaccurately call 'life tenure'"). Then we get a dab of history (the idea "was first established in the parliamentary Act of Settlement of 1701") and a civics lesson (life tenure represented "a significant step toward creating a professional class of qualified judges who could act as an independent source of legal authority"). Lipsky has a lighter touch throughout: "President Andrew Johnson had the distinction of being tried for violating a law that would later be recognized as unconstitutional." "The commerce clause has been a kind of constitutional shuttle on the loom of our national fabric." "The Air Force took off from a runway other than the Constitution, which provides for two independent branches of the military - not three." But as he finishes with the Constitution's first two articles, he loses some steam. He starts to quote longish passages from scholars and judicial decisions, and he describes fewer historical episodes. Rakove, on the other hand, gains momentum as his book progresses. His writing becomes slyer, shedding some of its textbook quality. He also becomes more judgmental, a quality mostly missing in Lipsky. Lipsky rarely makes ideological points and does not promote interpretive theories, whereas Rakove occasionally pushes back against originalism, the theory that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at the time of its adoption. His Constitution is one "the living generation could reshape." More interested in text and history than anecdotes and politics, Rakove does not mention Mississippi's belated ratification of the 13th Amendment, but he does note that the amendment contains the only appearance of the word "slavery" in the Constitution. (The framers used euphemisms, which simultaneously connoted hypocrisy, moral cowardice and embarrassment born of decency.) Rakove adds that the 13 th Amendment was the first to give Congress the power of enforcement, which would have seemed superfluous but for a "distrust of the will and capacity of the Supreme Court, an institution still tainted by the memory of the Dred Scott case (1857), to respond judicially to the opposition that emancipation might spark." He amplifies this point in the context of a similar enforcement provision, Section 5 of the 14 th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. In the 1997 case of City of Boerne v. Flores, Rakove writes, the Supreme Court managed to read that grant of power to Congress as a limitation on what it could do. "Speaking in the imperious voice so typical of its modern jurisprudence, the court held that it alone could make decisions as to the substance and content of constitutional rights," Rakove says. "Such a brash statement would have confounded the authors of Section 5, who came to their task convinced that the same institution that had decided Dred Scott less than a decade earlier might not always be the sole or wisest guardian of rights." Lipsky has nothing to say about Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. BUT both authors tell the story of Gregory Watson, a University of Texas undergraduate who wrote a paper on one of the amendments proposed at the time of the Bill of Rights but not adopted. It would have made Congressional pay raises effective only after the next election. Watson started a letter-writing campaign, noting that in this case there was no deadline for ratification. The upshot was the most recent amendment, the 27th, ratified in 1992. Characteristically, it is Lipsky who includes the killer detail. Watson's professor, unconvinced that the amendment was still pending, gave him a C. There is a great deal to be said for reading every word of the Constitution and pausing over each one. Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 10, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This probing commentary on America's founding documents by constitutional historian Rakove (winner of a Pulitzer for Original Meanings) begins with a long essay on their historical and political background, stressing their ideological innovations. His detailed exegeses unavoidably lose some thematic coherence while elucidating the Declaration as a work of propaganda (considerably overstating George III's despotism, notes Rakove) and the Constitution's murky political compromises. Rakove is a constitutionalist-but he's palpably dissatisfied with the Constitution we've got. Among other complaints, he says amending the Constitution is so difficult, we passively interpret it instead of remaking it to suit our evolving purposes. Rakove's is a lucid, thought-provoking guide to the contents-and discontents-of our national charters. 34 b&w illus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
What are the frameworks through which we govern our country? In separate texts, Rakove and Lipsky provide annotated analysis of our founding U.S. documents. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rakove (history & political science, Stanford Univ.; Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution) presents both the Declaration and the Constitution with carefully laid out annotation that's accessible to general readers as well as high school and college students. His extended introduction provides a readable and instructive analysis of how the writing of the Constitution progressed, especially on matters concerning representation, executive power, and creation of the amendments. His annotations often rely upon contemporary usage and meaning from the time of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution-useful for students to understand-and he compares such usage to other documents of the time. Lipsky (founding editor, New York Sun) provides a lay reader's guide to the Constitution in a readable journalistic style. He refers to standard texts such as M. Farrand's multivolume Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, as well as letters and periodical pieces from the time of the document's development. In many provisions, Lipsky provides historical background, giving a broader social and political context than Rakove, and often cites conflicting opinions regarding the meaning of particular words or phrases. Rakove recognizes that the "precise meaning" of terms at the time of the documents' creation might not be ascertainable, and he offers reasonable interpretations to indicate constitutional implications of such terms through case law or congressional statutes. VERDICT The books are not strictly duplicative. Lipsky connects the Constitution to 21st-century issues, while Rakove, with more accessible annotations relating to key ideas and terms, shows links between the Declaration and Constitution. Both Rakove's and Lipsky's approaches are highly recommended for general readers and undergraduates who want an initial understanding of the Declaration and Constitution.-Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
