Original Meanings

He is the William R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor of Political Science, and by courtesy, Law Emeritus at Stanford University.

He is the author of eight books, including The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which won a Pulitzer Prize in history, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America.

For Professor Rakove, we have moved beyond a state of constitutional crisis to a time of what he terms constitutional failure.

In our conversation, we talked about how constitutional failure is a product of President Trump's policies, leadership, and how he has used executive power.

So it is a fundament, the founding principle of American constitutional jurisprudence, that you have to place the text of the Constitution first and foremost in front of one.

That begs as many questions as it raises, because the whole problem, okay, how do you interpret the Constitution? What is your mode of interpretation? So currently, and actually for some years now, we've been engaged in a process of constitutional interpretation known as originalism, which says that it is the original meaning of the text or the original intentions of its framers or the original understandings of its ratifiers.

And I use those three terms quite specifically and precisely, and I wrote a whole book, my book, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which came out thirty years ago and was a, proud to say, was a Pulitzer Prize winner, was meant in some respects to spell out the difference between the meaning of the text, the intentions of its authors, and the understanding of its ratifiers.

So the whole question about how we interpret the Constitution dominates American constitutional thinking, and we have different theories of interpretation.