A Book Review: Long Live the Bill of Rights! Long Live Akhil Reed Amar's the Bill of Rights!

Abstract

Akhil Reed Amar's volume, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction ("The Bill of Rights"), deserves to sit on every constitutional scholar and lawyer's shelf along with such other contemporary classics as Alexander Bickel's The Least Dangerous Branch, Charles Black's Structure and Relationship in Constitutional Law, John Hart Ely's Democracy and Distrust, and Philip Bobbitt's Constitutional Fate. This book builds on two of the most breathtaking and important law review articles of the past decade-Professor Amar's The Bill of Rights as a Constitution, and The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. Professor Amar's contributions to constitutional scholarship are of the first order. The Bill of Rights is the centerpiece of that contribution but it is scarcely its limit. The author will focus, very briefly, on the following four aspects of The Bill of Rights which he believes help to explain its significance: (1) its place as the cornerstone of a large and seemingly well-integrated scholarly agenda; (2) its analytic methodology; (3) its explanatory power; and (4) its rhetorical elegance.

Keywords: book review, Bill of Rights, Constitution, constitutional law