AFTER WORDS.

• Author: Amar, Akhil Reed
• Position: Response to articles in this issue, p. 1, 13, 27, 41, 55

My favorite moment in John Roberts' 2005 Supreme Court confirmation hearing came when a friendly Senator lobbed the nominee a softball. Roberts knocked it out of the park. I'll return to that fun episode at the end of this Essay, but I first need to do some serious business.

Most important of all, I must offer my sincere thanks. To the five gracious scholars who have in the preceding pages cordially engaged my latest and longest book: Thanks for your willingness to offer such deep and detailed reactions.

To the University of Illinois College of Law: Thanks for sponsoring an in-person symposium on Constitution Day, 2021, a constitutional convention (of sorts) out of which these reaction essays emerged.

To Jason Mazzone, in particular: Special thanks for organizing the in-person symposium and then going the extra mile with your dazzling meditations on the hook itself. (Your Post Office stuff is particularly cool!)

To Illinois's Dean, Vikram David Amar: Thanks for being such a great host for this event (and always a great brother more generally).

To the University of Minnesota and the editors of Constitutional Commentary, especially Jill Hasday and Brian Bix: Thanks for opening the pages of this journal to enshrine all these words about The Words.

And finally, Dear Reader: Thanks for your interest in the preceding reaction essays. Please do keep reading the current essay to see a few of my responses. As a bonus, if you make it to the end, I will explain how the print symposium you are now reading connects to John Roberts' home run in 2005.

1. REACTING TO THE REACTIONS

   The five preceding essays go off in five strikingly different directions. Some range far beyond the book. A reader who has not yet experienced firsthand The Words That Made Us may well wonder, "what exactly is the book about? How could one book prompt such unconnected responses, wandering down such different paths?"

   In truth, my tome is about a great many things and each essayist has concentrated on a different part of the elephant. (There are many more parts, besides.) Unsurprisingly, each essayist has identified an aspect of the book that engages something of special interest to that author. Let's consider the respondents in alphabetical order.

   GERHARDT

   Michael Gerhardt is a special scholar in the world of American constitutional law. I consider him a kindred spirit. Like me, he seeks to unite law with history and political science. Like me, he strives to show that constitutional law outside of courts merits at least as much attention as does constitutional case law. Like me, he writes books aimed not merely at fellow academicians but also, simultaneously, at serious lay readers. (2) (Many law professors by contrast strive only to produce high-quality articles for specialists in their respective academic niches.)

   Gerhardt raises a dizzying number of provocative points about my book. One in particular caught my eye, because it is the sort of apercu that comes naturally to a prolific book-author such as Gerhardt: "A tough thing for any scholar is to know where to start a book. Professor Amar chose 1760." (3)

   Act I, scene 1 is indeed a special challenge for every book author. Perhaps the first thing to note about my book is my start date, 1760. Not 1763--the opening year of just about every book on the American Revolution now in print.

   I argue that the American Revolution, and thus the American constitutional conversation that it spawned, started with imperial geopolitics--with the fall of French Montreal to the British in 1760, even before the 1763 Treaty of Paris and ensuing 1764 Sugar Act and 1765 Stamp Act. Ultimately, Americans revolted because they could. This was not a sufficient condition for revolution, but it was a necessary one.

   After the fall of Montreal, colonists began to imagine life without the British shield, and it did not take long after Montreal's fall for this imagination to reveal itself. Even before the British started seriously misbehaving--indeed, even before the Treaty of Paris formally confirmed the new facts on the ground in Montreal--some Americans (at least in Boston, where it all began) were beginning to itch and agitate. True, the Brits were negligent and inattentive. But they were not tyrannical--not yet. On the law, British royal officialdom in provincial Massachusetts, led by proto-loyalists such as Thomas Hutchinson, was actually on solid ground in Paxton's Case, a fascinating 1761 lawsuit involving writs of assistance. But that hardly mattered to various proto-revolutionaries involved in the case, including James Otis and John Adams.

   No other American scholar nowadays begins the story of the American Revolution this way or lavishes detailed attention upon Paxton's Case. In fact, in recent decades almost no general textbook or trade book about the Revolution--almost no broad-gauged historian of the Revolution--has offered more than a fleeting mention of this 1761 writs-of-assistance case. (The Supreme Court has routinely mentioned the case, but has bungled the technicalities and never come close to seeing what the episode was really all about.) Despite all this, I chose to begin my movie--act I, scene 1--with the first time "Harry met Sally," so to speak. The bad blood between Otis and Adams on the one side and Hutchinson on the other began in Paxton's Case, and proved quite significant over the next fifteen years.

   MAZZONE

   Jason Mazzone is a sparkling constitutional historian with a particular interest in American constitutional culture and its roots in American free speech and American federalism. He is a beloved former student of mine and a regular co-author of one of my regular co-authors, the aforementioned Vikram David Amar. If any reader has not yet perused the preceding essays, Mazzone's is the best place to start, because it places my book in the largest context and directly engages more of its central themes--especially the Words and the Constitutional Conversation signified by the book's title and subtitle.

   Mazzone rightly highlights the enormous emphasis I place on early American newspapers and newspapermen. He quotes one of my favorite lines in the book: "all the great founding fathers were early sires and children of America's emerging newspaper culture" (p. 304). (4)

   To be more specific: Benjamin Franklin was a self-made printer and popular writer who amassed a fortune before age forty by creating what we would call today a media empire--a string of affiliated print shops and paper mills across the continent. Alexander Hamilton published his first notable newspaper piece, a compelling description of a tropical hurricane, while a mere lad in the West Indies. This was his first big break in life--the vivid...