Unwritten Parts of Constitution Just as Strong as Document, Scholar Says

In honor of the 225th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, Akhil Reed Amar encouraged Americans to consider the power of the unwritten parts of the document, which are part of U.S. culture.

“Americans revere this document without reading it,” Amar said.

Amar spoke on his latest book America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By before 150 students, faculty, staff and his own family members at Pepperdine School of Law in late August.

“On Sept. 17 of 1787 this is what the world looked like: Democracy exists almost nowhere on the planet,” Amar said. “… The vast mass of humanity and of land groans under tyrants, khans, mogul lords, czars, tribal chiefs, kings, princes, emperor, and the like.”

He said the momentum from the Constitution flowered into several amendments that, for the most part, have only led to the increase in civil rights.

“That changes the world. The world is now more American than ever before. And America is more global than ever before,” Amar said.

Amar said his new book goes away from the chronology of his first book “America’s Constitution: A Biography,” and seeks to “read between the lines.”

Amar said the Constitution does not come with a complete set of instructions of how to read it.

“Sometimes the Constitution means the exact opposite of what the words seem to say,” he said.  “… We cannot read the Constitution literally. We have to read it faithfully.”

He said the right of free speech was an unspoken part of the original creation of the Constitution.

“Even before there is a text of the freedom of speech, it is part of the very process that we get the constitution,” Amar said, adding that the document was adopted state-by-state through a simple majority vote.

He said that tradition of American values lives on in modern society.

“The Constitution is our Taj Majal, it’s our Queen Elizabeth. There are other texts that we all acknowledge as having a tremendous force of statements of what it means to be an American,” Amar said, pointing to the Gettysburg Address, the “I Have a Dream” speech and the Northwest Ordinance.

Akhil Reed Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School.