Pursuits of Knowledge

A detailed and compelling examination of how the legal theory of originalism ignores and distorts the very constitutional history from which it derives interpretive authority. 

Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory’s core tenet—that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning—has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the distant constitutional past. Yet originalist engagement with history is often deeply problematic. And now that a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court champion originalism, the task of scrutinizing originalists’ use and abuse of history has never been more urgent.  

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK ➔

In this comprehensive and novel critique of originalism, Jonathan Gienapp targets originalists’ unspoken assumptions about the Constitution and its history. Originalists are committed to recovering the Constitution laid down at the American Founding, yet they often assume that the Constitution is fundamentally modern. Rather than recovering the original Constitution, they project their own understandings onto it, assuming that eighteenth-century constitutional thinking was no different than their own. They take for granted what it meant to write a constitution down, what law was, how it worked, and where it came from, and how a constitution’s meaning was fixed. In the process, they erase the Constitution that eighteenth-century Americans in fact created. By understanding how originalism fails, we can better understand the Constitution that we have. 

Moderated by A.E. Dick Howard, White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Meet the author and book signing available after the program.

About the Author

Dr. Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Law at Stanford University. He specializes in the constitutional, political, and intellectual history of the American Revolutionary era and his scholarship has focused primarily on the origins and early development of the U.S. Constitution.

His most recent book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale University Press, 2024), mounts a comprehensive historical critique of the theory of constitutional originalism, now ascendant on the U.S. Supreme Court. It builds from his first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press Belknap, 2018), which explored how understandings of the U.S. Constitution transformed during the decade following its ratification. His next book will explore the forgotten history of the Constitution’s Preamble and what it reveals about constitutional thinking past and present.  

About the Moderator

A.E. Dick Howard is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, he is a graduate of the University of Richmond; received his law degree from the University of Virginia; was the first Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Residence at Rhodes House, Oxford; and clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Prof. Howard was executive director of the commission that wrote Virginia's new Constitution. Twice a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he has been counsel to the General Assembly of Virginia and a consultant to state and federal bodies, including the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. From 1982 - 1986 he served as Counselor to the Governor of Virginia, and chaired Virginia's Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution.

Prof. Howard’s many recognitions have included President of the Virginia Academy of Laureates and receiving UVA’s Distinguished Professor Award for excellence in teaching. James Madison University, the University of Richmond, Campbell University, the College of William and Mary, and Wake Forest University have conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

May 6 - Sold Out!
May 7 - Sold Out!

Experience the passion and ideals that inspired a revolution and the birth of a new nation through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson and his good friend, fellow revolutionary and political rival, John Adams. Written by Howard Ginsberg and based on his original play, Jefferson & Adams is the moving and powerful dramatization of the remarkable friendship between two presidents of the United States, with the forthright Mrs. Adams always playing a major role. 

Playwright Howard Ginsberg draws from their prolific correspondence to tell the story of the turbulent 52-year friendship between Jefferson, Adams, and Adams’ wife Abigail in a poignant stage performance that combines compelling political thought with passionate personal beliefs. The production features Bill Barker as Thomas Jefferson; Sam Goodyear as John Adams; and Abigail Schumann as Abigail Adams.

About the Performers

Veteran historical actor-interpreter Bill Barker is widely recognized as the nation’s foremost interpreter of Thomas Jefferson. After portraying Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg for 26 years, Barker joined the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello in 2019. Barker began interpreting Jefferson in 1984 — fittingly, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Combining the tools of theater with rigorous historical scholarship, his approach explores Jefferson’s life and times, and how it relates to our world today.

Barker has performed as Jefferson around the country and around the world, at sites including the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Palace of Versailles, and more. He has been featured as Jefferson in numerous publications including TIME, People, and Southern Living, and has appeared as Jefferson on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. Monticello guests encounter Barker as Mr. Jefferson in regularly-scheduled programming at Monticello. He also contributes to educational outreach efforts, including electronic field trips and livestream programs, and represents Monticello at special events around the country.

Sam Goodyear has portrayed variously James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Rush, Cole Porter, U.S. Grant, and Santa Clause. The figure with whom he most identifies, however, is John Adams, since appearing in the 1995 world premiere production of Jefferson & Adams at the Leatherstocking Theatre Company in Cooperstown, NY. John Adams himself regretted never visiting Monticello, and thus this presentation can be seen as a posthumous wish come true.

Abigail Schumann is a Virginia-based actor and living history performer, and a past recipient of the Women in American History Award, presented by the Daughters of the American Revolution, for her work interpreting women’s lives through performance.

In celebration of Civic Season at Monticello, join us for a conversation with bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands on his book, Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics, a revelatory history on the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States.

To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, Brands crafts a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.

About the Author

H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes on American history and politics, with books including Founding Partisans, Our First Civil War, and The Zealot and the Emancipator.

Several of his books have been bestsellers; two, Traitor to His Class and The First American, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.