The newly published third edition brings the material up-to-date with both the latest historical scholarship and the most recent Supreme Court decisions using historical analysis. Among both judges and academics, one of the hottest issues in constitutional law is the role of "original intent." Almost everyone agrees that it is important, and some scholars and judges believe it should be the most important factor in constitutional law. To think about these issues intelligently, law students need to have ready access to the historical materials so they can see how the Framers of the Constitution thought about critical issues. Yet the original source materials fill many volumes.

Writings by historians also fill many bookshelves. Just as the traditional casebook selects and condenses materials from the court reports to make them useful for law students, this book does the same thing for the historical evidence of original intent. There is no other source that covers this range of materials, combined with concise overviews of the best understanding of the historical context. Only this book gives students a cogent introduction to the history behind the Constitution and its major amendments, so they can form their own judgments about the "original understanding" and its relevance to modern constitutional law.