Jack Rakove: What kind of constitution do we have, anyway?
Bruno and Sallie Pasquinelli Constitutional Conversations Lecture Series
January 27, 2025
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM
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Download iCal FileJack Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Law, Emeritus, at Stanford University, where he began teaching in 1980. He was educated at Haverford College, where he earned a B.A. in History in 1968, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in History in 1975 and studied under Bernard Bailyn. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Colgate University from 1975-1980. At Stanford he taught courses in early American history and the origins and interpretation of the Constitution. He is the author of eight books: The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979); James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (revised edition, Addison, Wesley, Longman, 2001, 2006); Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996), which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History, the 1997 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and the 1998 Society of the Cincinnati Book Prize; Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997); The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize; A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); and Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is currently at work on The Ticklish Experiment: A Political History of the Constitution, 1789-2024 (under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux). Rakove is also the editor of Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); James Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, September 1999); a collection of scholarly essays on The Unfinished Election of 2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001); The Federalist: The Essential Essays (Boston: Bedford Books, 2003); and Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006). Along with Colleen Sheehan, he is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist (2020).
Rakove has contributed chapters to numerous scholarly collections, and written essays for various journals, including Perspectives in American History, William and Mary Quarterly, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. He has published numerous op-ed articles in such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. In November 1998 he testified at the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearings on the Background and History of Impeachment. He has served as a consultant and expert witness in several cases involving Indian land claims in New York State dating to the 1780s and has written five amicus curiae briefs for the Supreme Court, including one cited by Justice John Paul Stevens in D.C. v. Heller (2008), the leading Second Amendment case, and most recently, Moore v. Harper (2022). He has also been involved with various media projects, including Dateline ‘87, a fourteen-episode radio program on the Constitutional Convention; Liberty’s Kids, a forty-episode animated cartoon history of the American Revolution produced by DIC Entertainment in beautiful downtown Burbank, California for PBS; and Whose Curse Is Worse: The Red Sox and Cubs on Trial, which aired on ESPN in September 2004. He has appeared on the News Hour, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, and numerous radio interviews. (The appearance on the Daily Show was part of that program’s sample episode for its 2010 Emmy.)
In 2003-2004, Rakove was president of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic. He has also served on the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1999 and the American Philosophical Society since 2007. During 2006-2007 and again in 2016-2017, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He served on the board of directors at James Madison’s Montpelier from 2011-2021. He has been a visiting professor at the law schools of New York University, Tel Aviv University, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Rakove and his wife Helen, a retired attorney, live on the Stanford campus. Their older son Rob is a lecturer in International Relations at Stanford and the author of two books on American foreign relations in the twentieth century; their younger son Dan is a Foreign Service Office who has been stationed in Ulaanbaatar, Seoul, Dhaka, Yokohama, and Fukuoka, and is currently back at Foggy Bottom, before heading to Tashkent.
Event will be livestreamed. Please register below.
Date posted
Jan 9, 2025
Date updated
Jan 9, 2025