
Hearing the People, Part 2: America's Unwritten Constitution
Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar continues his course on the unwritten Constitution by tracing how privacy displaced property as the organizing idea behind constitutional rights. He builds the argument from Justice Harlan's reasoning in Griswold and the Third and Fourth Amendments, moves through home-life cases from Stanley v. Georgia to gun rights and the Kelo takings dispute, and connects Gideon's right to counsel to an egalitarian reading of constitutional protection. He then turns to the Eighth Amendment, showing how the word unusual invites courts to count evolving practice in juvenile and diminished-capacity death penalty cases. Amar closes by making the case for grounding these unenumerated rights in the Privileges and Immunities Clause rather than substantive due process. Chapters mark each case and argument, making this a dense but navigable installment of his Yale lecture series on constitutional interpretation.