Jonathan Gienapp's Case Against Originalism: Why the Constitution Was Never Meant to Be Frozen in Time

Originalism rests on a historical fantasy. And Jonathan Gienapp shows why the past never meant what today's Supreme Court claims it did.

Cover of Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique by Jonathan Gienapp (Yale University Press, 2024), a landmark challenge to the legal and historical claims of originalist constitutional interpretation.

Jonathan Gienapp’s Against Constitutional Originalism delivers a profound challenge to the dominant mode of constitutional interpretatio…