At Volokh Conspiracy, Steven Calabresi: Gordon S. Wood Weighs in on Akhil Reed Amar’s Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920. From the introduction:
On September 16, Yale Law professor Akhil Reed Amar published Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920, the second volume of an in-progress three-volume history of America’s constitutional project from 1760 to the present day. The first volume, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, was published in 2021. I much liked both volumes (more on that below), and I’m delighted to report that America’s greatest historian of the Founding era, Gordon S. Wood, has recently publicly praised them as well.
Wood wrote a detailed review of Born Equal that he read aloud at a September 19 Yale Law School conference on originalism that I organized; Wood labeled Born Equal “wonderful” and went on to say that,
[I]t is the most extraordinary kind of history that I have read…. [Akhil] has paid tribute to the power of equality in our political and constitutional lives as no other historian ever has.
The complete transcript of Wood’s glowing remarks may be found here …
Professor Calabresi adds that in his view Born Equal is “the best new book this year.”
RELATED: At Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum’s “Legal Theory Bookworm” recommends the book and collects effusive reviews.
Posted at 6:04 AM