Akhil Reed Amar

He's purposely misrepresenting some things.

Scholars such as Yale's Akhil Amar concede that the people of the several states ratified the Constitution.

Amar contends, though, contends, however, that the act of ratification was the world's largest corporate merger, which created a single indissoluble united people.

Amar is a distinguished scholar, but his merger theory would have been declared heretical by citizens living at the time of ratification.

[upbeat piano music] Welcome to another episode of Amar's Constitution.

I'm Andy Lipka, here with Professor Akhil Amar, now a year older.

And once again, we have guests today.

We have Professor Vik Amar returning to discuss yet another issue, and we'll have the second part of our interview with Professor Steven Smith on his new book on statesmanship and how that relates to constitutional matters, and so forth.

But I do think the statesman, one of the points I wanna make in the book is that the statesman is a rare phenomenon.

We would be fortunate if we have one in our lifetime.

So just to follow up on this though, I don't wanna leave it yet because I think that Akhil's point about, or at least his question, that is there a moral component? And you're saying there's a normative component, but they're not quite the same thing.

And in terms of what you were saying with the Aristotelian trilogy or triad, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking, okay, pathos.

I don't use it because that sounds like a shoe I'm not cool enough to wear.

So the concept of it comes from Akhil Amar, who is one of the nation's leading constitutional scholar at Yale.

He often says that he is great friends with Justice Thomas.

It's been discussed very favorably by Judge Walker on the DC Circuit, one of the strongest Federalist Society credentials on the federal bench, and by Seth Waxman, former Solicitor General.

Welcome to another episode of Amarica's Constitution.

I'm Andy Lipka here with Professor Akhil Amar.

Hello, Akhil.

Hey, Andy.

And why is that so important? Because it suggests there was no systematic gap between the two of them, that they were closely entwined.

And so to give you an illustration of the mistake, my good friend, John, in a recent piece on Civitas Outlook, in which he starts talking about the context of the Constitution has to prevail over the natural law sentiment.

The difficulty with that is a natural sentiment is what was embedded in the text.

And everybody knew it, including Vattel.

It's also in Kent when he quotes Vattel and so forth.

But we are told a completely different thing, and then we have to figure out what we're supposed to do, and we don't know what the answer to that question.

To make it worse, when you start saying it's a birthright citizenship stuff, the Supreme Court only applied this to essentially illegal aliens and transients, right? But my friend Akhil Amar, who always has a highly fevered intelligence, right? What he says is, look, I was born in the United States.

My older brother Vic was born overseas.

[upbeat piano music] Welcome to another episode of "America's Constitution." I'm Andy Lipka, here with Professor Akhil Amar and a guest that our audience is very familiar with, Professor Vic Amar.

First of all, welcome back to your podcast, Akhil.

To ours.

It doesn't make too much sense that Congress could let courts appoint other people in the executive branch who have nothing to do with the courts.

And so we cite a law review article by Akhil Amar where he takes this issue on directly

I was going to say, John, we don't always quote constitutional law professors here at NCLA, but when we do, we like to quote Akhil Amar.

No, it's not usually Akhil Amar, but go ahead, Jacob.

What does Professor Amar say?

Yeah, and so he takes that view that if you read this in the context of the whole Constitution and how it treats – Inferiors relative to superiors.

They did it in the Defense of Marriage Act.

They did it for other acts where they have said, you're going to argue for the government because the government's dropped out.