The Bill Of Rights: Creation And Reconstruction

Amar's landmark work invites citizens to a deeper understanding of their Bill of Rights and will set the basic terms of debate about it for modern lawyers, jurists, and historians for years to come. In our continuing battles over freedom of religion and expression, arms bearing, privacy, and states rights, Amar concludes, we must hearken to both the Founding Fathers who created the Bill and their sons and daughters who reconstructed it.

A leading scholar of constitutional law delivers an incisive and brilliant new account of the Bill of Rights and explodes conventional wisdom about our most basic charter of liberty. Akhil Reed Amar not only illuminates the text, structure, and history of the 1789 Bill but also argues that its present character owes more to antislavery activists of the Reconstruction era than to the Founding Fathers who created the Bill.