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The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen's Guidebook to the American Bill of Rights
A VALUABLE REFERENCE TO UNDERSTANDING YOUR FREEDOMS.
Many Americans reference the Bill of Rights, a document that represents many of the freedoms that define the United States. Who doesn't know about the First Amendment's freedom of religion or Second Amendment's right to bear arms? In this succinct volume, Akhil Reed Amar and Les Adams offer a wealth of knowledge about the Bill of Rights that goes beyond a basic understanding. 'THE BILL OF RIGHTS PRIMER' is an authoritative guide to all American freedoms. Uncluttered and well-organized, this audiobook is perfect for those who want to study up on the Bill of Rights without needing a law degree to do so.
This elementary guidebook presents a short historical survey of the people, events, decrees, legislation, writings, and cultural milestones, in England and the American colonies, that influenced the Founding Fathers as they drafted the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. With helpful comments and fun facts, the book will provide a deeper understanding of the Bill of Rights, exhibiting that it is not a stagnant document but one with evolving meaning shaped by historical events, such as the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
RUNNING TIME ⇨ 8hrs. and 5mins.
©2013 Skyhorse Publishing (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Many Americans reference the Bill of Rights, a document that represents many of the freedoms that define the United States. Who doesn't know about the First Amendment's freedom of religion or Second Amendment's right to bear arms? In this succinct volume, Akhil Reed Amar and Les Adams offer a wealth of knowledge about the Bill of Rights that goes beyond a basic understanding. 'THE BILL OF RIGHTS PRIMER' is an authoritative guide to all American freedoms. Uncluttered and well-organized, this audiobook is perfect for those who want to study up on the Bill of Rights without needing a law degree to do so.
This elementary guidebook presents a short historical survey of the people, events, decrees, legislation, writings, and cultural milestones, in England and the American colonies, that influenced the Founding Fathers as they drafted the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. With helpful comments and fun facts, the book will provide a deeper understanding of the Bill of Rights, exhibiting that it is not a stagnant document but one with evolving meaning shaped by historical events, such as the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
RUNNING TIME ⇨ 8hrs. and 5mins.
©2013 Skyhorse Publishing (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Audible Audio
First published July 1, 2013
91 people are currently reading
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About the author
Akhil Reed Amar
32 books185 followersAkhil Reed Amar is currently Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. He received his B.A, summa cum laude, in 1980 from Yale College, and his J.D. in 1984 from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Judge Stephen Breyer, he joined the Yale faculty in 1985. In 1994 he received the Paul Bator award from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, and in 1997 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of law by Suffolk University. In 1995 the National Law Journal named him as one of 40 “Rising Stars in the Law,” and in 1997 The American Lawyer placed him on their “Public Sector 45" list. His work on the Bill of Rights also earned the ABA Certificate of Merit and the Yale University Press Governor’s Award. He has delivered endowed lectures at over two dozen colleges and universities, and has written widely on constitutional issues for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate. He is also a contributing editor to The American Lawyer. His many law review articles and books have been widely cited by scholars, judges, and lawmakers; for example, the Justices of the United States Supreme Court have invoked his work in more than twenty cases, and he has testified before Congress on a wide range of constitutional issues. Along with Dean Paul Brest and Professors Sanford Levinson, Jack Balkin, and Reva Siegel, Professor Amar is the co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking. He is also the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (Yale Univ. Press, 1997), The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House 2005), and most recently, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2012).
from http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/amarb...
from http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/amarb...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 18, 2013
Probably needs to be read by all Americans every ten years or so. Defines the Bill of Rights as the first ten amendments to the Constitution along with the 14th amendment. The issues we deal with today have always been issues and it's instructive to see how our country has dealt with them through its history.
December 18, 2018
The Kindle version of The Bill of Rights Primer is so horribly formatted it is difficult to read. There are some serious editing issues as well (which could be part of the formatting problems). The authors are dreadfully boring and talk in circles, repeating themselves over and over. I’m not sure they actually made the argument they said in the beginning they were going to make and then asserted at the end that they made. They do cover the first ten amendments plus the fourteenth which makes the book slightly worthwhile. Because of the formatting problems and how terribly written it is, I cannot recommend it to anyone.
July 26, 2022
Summary: A discussion of the history and role of the Bill of Rights.
I have previously read Akhil Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography. One of my complaints about that book was that I thought it did not have enough focus on the Bill of Rights. I didn't realize when I read it that Akhil Amar had already written a long book on the Bill of Rights. This book, The Bill of Rights Primer, is designed to be a more popular level book covering the same rough content.
This oversimplifies, but the rough thesis of the book is to give a history of how the Bill of Rights was developed and understood by the original writers. And then a discussion of how the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Era changed how the Bill of Rights was understood and used. I decided to pick up this book after I listened to a podcast with Amar on Advisory Opinions. Primarily they discussed constitutional interpretation. Amar is a liberal originalist and one of the early members of the Federalist Society, which is generally a conservative legal group. That podcast helped me understand Amar's approach to America's Constitution and The Bill of Rights Primer. While I think that Amar raises legitimate points to critique constitutional interpretative theory, especially of liberals, I still found weaknesses of originalism's approach to be under-discussed.
That being said, it is very helpful to understand how the Bill of Rights has changed because of the 14th Amendment. I think one of the weaknesses of the modern originalist framework is that it seems to prioritize the original writer's understanding, not the Reconstruction Era revision. The original authors of the Constitution were primarily slaveholders, did not believe that women should vote, and mostly did not believe in direct democracy. I tend to think we should prioritize interpreting the earlier amendments through the later amendments.
Immediately after reading The Bill of Rights Primer, I started reading At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle McGuire. In the Bill of Rights Primer, Amar and Adams discuss how the grand jury was originally viewed as a check on governmental authority because grand juries could refuse to prosecute crimes that they viewed as unconstitutional or not crimes. But as At The Dark End of the Street detailed, the refusal of grand juries to call rape or murder or lynching a crime and releasing white perpetrators when the victims were black is acceptable in the originalist reading of the 7th Amendment but it seems to violate the 14th Amendment by creating a system where crimes against black citizens were not prosecuted and where governmental officials (primarily police and officials that administrated voting) were able to use their authority to enforce segregation in violation of the spirit of the 14th Amendment.
Amar and Adams do discuss this problem, but I think without more history like what is discussed in At the Dark End of the Street, it is easy to think about originalism as an abstract theory of reading the constitution and not a theory that has historically been used to violate the rights of minority citizens within the US. Overall, I think that if you are interested in understanding the constitution, I would start with listening to the Advisory Opinion's podcast (the sound is not great.) And then read America's Consitution which has a good broad overview and history of the US. And then I would read Eric Foner's history of the Reconstuction Amendments. And if you are still interested at this point, The Bill of Rights Primer does add to that conversation.
As a Christian who has read pretty widely in biblical hermenutics, I think that the background there does have some relevance to other areas of literary or constitutional interpretation. It is interesting to me that generally, the courts do read the 1st Amendment through the lens of post-14th Amendment theory even if they do not always read other amendments that way. The early interpreters of the 1st Amendment did not believe that it really gave a free speech and religious rights to individuals. There are many examples of this, but one blatant one is that "In 1859 North Carolina sentenced the elderly Reverend Daniel Worth to a year in prison for circulating an anti-slavery tract. Then the state rewrote its laws to make “incendiary” antislavery expression punishable by death for the first offense." The fact that there could be a death sentence for speech that was inspired by religious belief is a very different understanding of the 1st Amendment than what is generally understood today. Originalist readings of the 1st Amendment are not reading that history without another interpretive theory overlaying it.
I have previously read Akhil Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography. One of my complaints about that book was that I thought it did not have enough focus on the Bill of Rights. I didn't realize when I read it that Akhil Amar had already written a long book on the Bill of Rights. This book, The Bill of Rights Primer, is designed to be a more popular level book covering the same rough content.
This oversimplifies, but the rough thesis of the book is to give a history of how the Bill of Rights was developed and understood by the original writers. And then a discussion of how the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Era changed how the Bill of Rights was understood and used. I decided to pick up this book after I listened to a podcast with Amar on Advisory Opinions. Primarily they discussed constitutional interpretation. Amar is a liberal originalist and one of the early members of the Federalist Society, which is generally a conservative legal group. That podcast helped me understand Amar's approach to America's Constitution and The Bill of Rights Primer. While I think that Amar raises legitimate points to critique constitutional interpretative theory, especially of liberals, I still found weaknesses of originalism's approach to be under-discussed.
That being said, it is very helpful to understand how the Bill of Rights has changed because of the 14th Amendment. I think one of the weaknesses of the modern originalist framework is that it seems to prioritize the original writer's understanding, not the Reconstruction Era revision. The original authors of the Constitution were primarily slaveholders, did not believe that women should vote, and mostly did not believe in direct democracy. I tend to think we should prioritize interpreting the earlier amendments through the later amendments.
Immediately after reading The Bill of Rights Primer, I started reading At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle McGuire. In the Bill of Rights Primer, Amar and Adams discuss how the grand jury was originally viewed as a check on governmental authority because grand juries could refuse to prosecute crimes that they viewed as unconstitutional or not crimes. But as At The Dark End of the Street detailed, the refusal of grand juries to call rape or murder or lynching a crime and releasing white perpetrators when the victims were black is acceptable in the originalist reading of the 7th Amendment but it seems to violate the 14th Amendment by creating a system where crimes against black citizens were not prosecuted and where governmental officials (primarily police and officials that administrated voting) were able to use their authority to enforce segregation in violation of the spirit of the 14th Amendment.
Amar and Adams do discuss this problem, but I think without more history like what is discussed in At the Dark End of the Street, it is easy to think about originalism as an abstract theory of reading the constitution and not a theory that has historically been used to violate the rights of minority citizens within the US. Overall, I think that if you are interested in understanding the constitution, I would start with listening to the Advisory Opinion's podcast (the sound is not great.) And then read America's Consitution which has a good broad overview and history of the US. And then I would read Eric Foner's history of the Reconstuction Amendments. And if you are still interested at this point, The Bill of Rights Primer does add to that conversation.
As a Christian who has read pretty widely in biblical hermenutics, I think that the background there does have some relevance to other areas of literary or constitutional interpretation. It is interesting to me that generally, the courts do read the 1st Amendment through the lens of post-14th Amendment theory even if they do not always read other amendments that way. The early interpreters of the 1st Amendment did not believe that it really gave a free speech and religious rights to individuals. There are many examples of this, but one blatant one is that "In 1859 North Carolina sentenced the elderly Reverend Daniel Worth to a year in prison for circulating an anti-slavery tract. Then the state rewrote its laws to make “incendiary” antislavery expression punishable by death for the first offense." The fact that there could be a death sentence for speech that was inspired by religious belief is a very different understanding of the 1st Amendment than what is generally understood today. Originalist readings of the 1st Amendment are not reading that history without another interpretive theory overlaying it.
June 4, 2017
This was more than a primer, which worked out well for me, as I have been doing a bit of research on the 14th Amendment, and this book provided an interesting overview. I do not agree with all of the author's conclusions, but it is a worthwhile read.
January 1, 2016
This is a good beginner’s book on the bill of rights. The book this book is based off is not that hard to read and I think is better, but for starters this is a good book to read.
November 23, 2017
Excellent overview of the legal precedents for the bill of rights and thorough exposition on them.
March 16, 2019
One man's opinion.
I enjoyed this look at the bill of rights and the 13th and 14th amendments. There was a lot of explanations of what they mean to the author.
I enjoyed this look at the bill of rights and the 13th and 14th amendments. There was a lot of explanations of what they mean to the author.
January 30, 2022
This is a good overview. At this stage I am beyond the basics. 3-stars.
July 4, 2023
Interesting. Big ideas but still an easy-enough read. Very timely background information to better understand some of the current SCOTUS opinions, particularly as they relate to the 14th Amendment.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews