Maps have potency. . . . For better or for worse.
— Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell1
Introduction
Whether written or unwritten, young or old, constitutions can’t compel the construction of institutions or the enforcement of norms any more than maps can create fences, checkpoints, or border patrols. And yet constitutions are powerful; they produce effects.2 Constitutional power may take the form of physical force;3 directions that are regarded as legitimate;4 or concerted action by members of a political community.5 It may rarely register at all, as people define the politically possible with reference to constitutions without realizing it.6
Akhil Amar’s Born Equal is an effort to perpetuate the power of the Constitution of the United States. Amar describes his book as a “continu[ation of] a narrative” (p. 15) that will span three volumes (p. 612), and he never leaves his readers in doubt about why he thinks this story is worth telling. Amar believes that people in the United States would be better off following the Constitution — as he understands it — than doing something else (pp. 611–12). He also believes that those who revere the Constitution and advance arguments grounded in its original meaning and purpose are more likely to win the day (p. 620). It’s fitting that Amar’s book is full of maps (p. 618), as Amar’s project resembles that of leading nineteenth-century mapmakers: the forging of a national identity.7 For Amar, that identity is, and ought to be, grounded in what he labels “originalism” (p. 2).
Amar is an engaging writer and a splendid storyteller. Alas — to borrow one of Amar’s favorite interjections — even at 726 pages, Born Equal omits too much of importance. The result of Amar’s attempt to fit an entire century’s worth of American constitutionalism into a coherent narrative is never boring. But, ultimately, it reveals more about the mapmaker than the territory.
Born Equal is organized geographically (pp. vii–viii). Each chapter names one or more sites of constitutionally significant events (pp. vii–viii). And geography plays an important role in Amar’s narrative. It informs the constitutional decisionmaking of the central characters, and it embeds those characters and their decisions in the reader’s memory.
Maps never fully describe the world,8 and they’re made to serve human purposes.9 Neither the geographical maps that fill Amar’s pages nor his own map of a century’s worth of constitutional territory are drawn from normatively neutral vantage points. Accordingly, neither is my own map of Amar’s map. Part I focuses on place-situated discussions that illustrate Amar’s understanding of American constitutionalism as well as my misgivings about it. Part II critiques Amar’s map by following his geographical organization and showing readers just how much constitutional territory he fails to cover — and how complex, conflictual, and confounding to Amar’s narrative it is.