Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law at Stanford University.  He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States. His primary focus to date has been the origins and development of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the ways in which Founding-era Americans understood and debated constitutionalism across the nation's early decades. His historical interests intersect with modern legal debates over constitutional interpretation and theory, especially those centered on the theory of constitutional originalism.

His first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence. His second book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique, presents a comprehensive historical critique of originalism. It argues that recovering Founding-era constitutionalism on its own terms fundamentally challenges originalists' unspoken assumptions about the U.S. Constitution and its original meaning. Gienapp has lectured widely on the U.S. Constitution and the American Founding era. 

Professor Gienapp's lecture is part of the 2024-2025 Lofgren Program on American Constitutionalism at CMC's Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World. His lecture is also supported by the Jack Miller Center.