America’s Unwritten Constitution is a prod to the profession to look for legal rules outside the Constitution’s text. This is a good thing, as outside the text there’s a vast amount of law—the everyday, nonconstitutional law, written and unwritten, that structures our government and society. Despite the book’s unorthodox framing, many of its claims can be reinterpreted in fully conventional legal terms, as the product of the text’s interaction with ordinary rules of law and language.This very orthodoxy, though, may undermine Akhil Amar’s case that America truly has an “unwritten Constitution.” In seeking to harmonize the text with deep theories of political legitimacy and with daily practice in the courts, the book may venture further than our conventional legal sources can support. To put it another way, anything the “unwritten Constitution” can do, unwritten law can do better; and what unwritten law can’t do, probably shouldn’t be tried. Yet whether or not we accept the idea of an unwritten constitution, by refocusing attention on America’s rich tradition of unwritten law, Amar performs a great service to constitutional scholarship.
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