Our deepest debates about America’s written Constitution are not about constitutional text, but about the unwritten ideas and understandings that guide our reading of text. Yet this fact is obscured by the public understanding of textualism and originalism. The (Un)Written Constitution makes these ideas visible by turning to the practices of Supreme Court justices and political actors in interpreting the Constitution over more than two centuries. How do we weigh and balance different textual provisions and see them as part of a constitutional whole? The text does not answer such questions. Moving beyond the text is an inescapable feature of interpreting America’s written Constitution.

About the Speaker

George Thomas is the Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College. He is the winner of the American Political Science Association’s 2006 Alexander L. George Award for the Best Article on Qualitative Methods and serves as an officer for the American Political Thought section of APSA. Professor Thomas specializes in the topics of American constitutionalism, American political thought, constitutional law, and the Supreme Court. He has written extensively on the Constitution, the Founders, and the history of American education. Aside from The (Un)Written Constitution, he is the author of The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and he has published articles in Perspectives on Politics, Polity, National Affairs, and Critical Review, among others.