Living Constitution or Fundamental Law?

Herman Belz is professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, Equality Transformed: A Quarter Century of Affirmative Action, and Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era, among other works.

Belz's highly readable and intelligent examination of the shifting meanings attached to constitutions demonstrates that the study of them has changed from 1787 through the Progressive Era, into World War II, and in the latter half of the 20th century. . . .A solid addition to collections on American History and constitutional law.

• Chapter 1 Introduction: Written Constitutionalism as the American ProjectChapter 2 Constitutionalism and the American FoundingChapter 3 Constitutional Realism in the Gilded AgeChapter 4 The Critique of Constitutionalism in the Progressive EraChapter 5 Andrew C. McLaughlin and the Defense of ConstitutionalismChapter 6 Changing Conceptions of Constitutionalism in the Era of World War II and the Cold WarChapter 7 The New Left Attack on ConstitutionalismChapter 8 Bureaucracy and ConstitutionalismChapter 9 Constitutional and Legal History in the 1980s: Reflections on American ConstitutionalismChapter 10 History, Theory and the ConstitutionChapter 11 The Originalist Challenge to the Living ConstitutionChapter 12 Index