The Constitution of the United States was born in controversy, and thus has it lived. From the time of the ratification struggle and the debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, to disputes between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, to the debate between Chief Justice John Marshall and President Andrew Jackson, to the crisis of the house divided and the impassioned rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, throughout American history the question of how to interpret the Constitution has animated and divided public opinion. The reason, of course, is that the Constitution is a document explicitly designed to order the nation's politics; politically, a great deal hangs on the peg of interpretation.

Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century there has been a growing public debate of a rather different sort over constitutional interpretation. It is, at one level, a debate that is part of the earlier American political tradition; but at another level it is unlike the other great constitutional debates up to that time. In those earlier debates, the line was typically drawn between those who understood themselves to be “strict” constructionists (such as Thomas Jefferson) and those who saw themselves as “fair” or “reasonable” constructionists (such as Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall). The question for both groups was how to read the Constitution.