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The Invisible Constitution.

Publication: Trial
Publication Date: 01-APR-09
Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: The Invisible Constitution.(Book review)

Article Excerpt
The Invisible Constitution

Laurence H. Tribe

Oxford University Press

www.oup.com/us

278 pp., $19.95

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For more than 200 years, America has wrestled with the question: What does the Constitution mean? Lawyers and judges, in particular, have puzzled over the subsidiary matter of how to answer that question.

No serious student of the Constitution denies that the text of the document is a touchstone of meaning. But text is just a starting point. Constitutional text is just markings on paper: To a Gujarati speaker viewing the document at the National Archives, it would be gibberish.

Deep knowledge of language, the kind of knowledge lawyers employ to interpret text, requires correspondingly deep understandings of culture and history. Absent this context, text is more than gibberish but less than precise.

Debates about how to interpret text rage in academia and at the Supreme Court, with...

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