This book originated serendipitously in the course of exploring what at first appeared to be two distinct and independent topics: the originalism debate in contemporary American constitutional theory and the question of how we properly understand the nature of law and constitutionalism. Writing separate papers on each topic, I began after a while to discover that I was developing the same argument implicitly in papers on both topics. While identifying and untangling that argument has been a difficult and time-consuming task, it has been nevertheless an exciting process as I learned that the two apparently independent topics are in fact related. Exploring the originalism debate in depth leads to important insights into the nature of law and constitutionalism, and those insights in turn illuminate – and, I believe, alter – the contours and premises of the originalism debate.

I offer this book, therefore, in the belief that it is indeed possible to say something original about the originalism debate. This project in one sense is a long way from my focus on the philosophy of Hegel during the early stages of my academic career, but in another sense it reflects two fundamental methodological perspectives I derived from that earlier work. First, what appears to be familiar to us usually stands most in need of careful reconsideration and analysis. As Hegel famously stated, “What is ‘familiarly known’ is not properly known, just for the reason that it is ‘familiar.’”