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THE LIVES OF THE CONSTITUTION
By Joseph Tartakovsky
We live in an era of
uncertainty about the future of our Constitution, but America’s
constitutional adventure is the inspiring story of how our people, for 230
years, have overcome one constitutional challenge after another. In his
compelling new history, The Lives of
the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America’s Supreme Law, Joseph
Tartakovsky, an attorney and historian who served as Nevada’s Deputy
Solicitor General, tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution
through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals - some renowned, like
Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James
Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Tartakovsky brings
to life the struggles of these men and women over our supreme law from its
origins in revolutionary America to the age of Trump. Sweeping from
settings as diverse as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and
crowded with a vivid Dickensian cast, Tartakovsky shows how our nation has
grappled with questions like racial and sexual equality, free speech,
economic liberty, gun rights, immigration, and the size of government. This
is the first book to tell the story of our Constitution as the story of our
people and its unique constitutional culture.
In The Lives of
the Constitution, you’ll learn:
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That we live in Alexander Hamilton’s America today (not Thomas
Jefferson’s);
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How Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil War;
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How Justice Stephen Field defined our immigration law;
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How Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America;
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How Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order in the battle
against Nazism and Communism;
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How Antonin Scalia died warning Americans about the
ever-growing reach of the Supreme Court; and
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That Ida Wells-Barnett was a one-woman army who fought a
lonely moral and journalistic war against anti-black violence and misogyny
between Reconstruction and the Jazz Age.
From the 1787
Philadelphia Convention to the clash over gay marriage, The Lives of the
Constitution is a grand tour through two centuries of constitutional
history as never told before, and an education in the principles that
sustain America in the most astonishing experiment in government ever
undertaken.
About the Author:
Joseph Tartakovsky is the James Wilson Fellow in Constitutional Law at the
Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy
and an editor at the Claremont Review of Books. His writings have appeared
in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times.
He has served as the Deputy Solicitor General of Nevada, a white-collar
criminal litigator at an international law firm, and as a law clerk to a federal
appellate judge.
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