Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar argues that when the written Constitution is ambiguous, symbolic texts fill the gaps, and walks through six of them. He traces the Declaration's no-taxation-without-representation principle into McCulloch v. Maryland and the dormant commerce clause, shows the Federalist Papers establishing national security as a founding purpose, and reads the Northwest Ordinance's anti-colonial logic into modern debates over Puerto Rican statehood. The lecture then turns to the Fourteenth Amendment, arguing the Gettysburg Address shaped its idea that Americans are born equal, and contrasts the narrower desegregation of Brown v. Board with the fuller integration King envisioned in his Dream speech. Amar closes by claiming Americans live in Lincoln's constitutional house rather than Jefferson's. Part of his Yale course America's Unwritten Constitution, the talk moves briskly through case law, founding documents, and civil rights history to make its case.