Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, The Character of the Constitution: Instrument and Constitution, which is forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities:
What was the character of the Constitution in the framing period? Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic did more to interest people in that question that perhaps any other single twentieth-century book. And yet we still struggle to answer the question. In fact, we stumble over what we even mean by constitution. In this brief essay, I distinguish two words: instrument and constitution. These two words illuminate the character of the Constitution in the framing era. They were long used by the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution. The productive ambiguity produced by this disambiguation is a central aspect of the American system Wood praised as "political theory worthy of a prominent place" in the history of political thought.
--Dan Ernst
