Our Constitution: Landmark Interpretations of America's Governing Document

by Michael Stokes Paulsen (Editor), Federalist Society (Creator)

Our Constitution is a straightforward and objective volume setting forth the text of the Constitution of the United States and the most important interpretations of that document by the U.S. Supreme Court and by other actors in our constitutional system. It focuses on the most important interpretations of the Constitution - those that have shaped our understandings of the Constitution and been of greatest historical consequence and enduring significance for the nation. The emphasis is on what has proven to be foundational, historic, or enduring, not on right and wrong. This is not a work of commentary. It leaves entirely to the reader the task of evaluating the merits of the interpretations. The cases and other documents are presented here, unadorned - and uncorrupted - by critical commentary. They are edited into as concise a form as possible, to make them accessible to general readers interested in America's Constitution and the most significant interpretations of that Constitution over time. Not everything the Supreme Court has said about the Constitution (or that the authors of The Federalist , or the framing generation, or revered Presidents, or leading members of Congress have said) is a correct interpretation of the Constitution. The materials presented here simply lay out what has been said about the Constitution that has proved to be of enduring importance in shaping our understandings of the Constitution, for good or for ill. The task of interpreting the interpretations - of evaluating these interpretations of the Constitution - is for the critical reader today. This reflects the faith of the Constitution's framers that We the People of the United States would be, and remain, the masters of their own written constitution, fully capable of interpreting it for themselves, doing so correctly, and applying it faithfully.

Genres: Politics, History, American History

474 pages, Hardcover

First published October 8, 2012

About the author

Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, where he has taught since 2007. Professor Paulsen is a graduate of Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and Yale Divinity School. He has served as a federal prosecutor, as Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as counsel for the Center for Law & Religious Freedom.

He was previously the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law & Public Policy and Associate Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he was on the faculty for sixteen years, from 1991-2007.

Professor Paulsen has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, Georgetown University, Bethel University, Uppsala University (Sweden), Daystar University (Kenya), and University of the Andes (Chile). In 2018, he was a fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

Professor Paulsen has been a guest lecturer at universities around the nation, including (among others) Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, NYU, Georgetown, Virginia, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Texas, and Minnesota.

He is the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and book chapters on a wide variety of constitutional law topics, which have been published in law journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review. He is the author or co-author of three books, including The Constitution: An Introduction (Basic Books, 2015) (co-authored with Luke Paulsen) and the casebook The Constitution of the United States, now in its third edition with Foundation Press.