The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic. By Akhil Reed Amar. New York: Basic Books, 2015. 357 pp. $29.99 hardcover.

• Date: 01 June 2017
• Published date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12272

Sabatello, Maya, & Marianne Schulze, eds. (2013) Human Rights and Disability Advocacy.

Philadelphia: Univ.of Pennsylvania Press.

Shapiro, Joseph P. (1994) No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights

Movement. New York:Three Rivers Press.

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The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic.

By Akhil Reed Amar. New York: Basic Books, 2015. 357 pp.

$29.99 hardcover.

Reviewed by Julie Novkov, Department of Political Science, University

at Albany, SUNY

Constitutional law scholar Akhil Amar’s latest book analyzes federal-

ism under the constitution through the creative means of a road

tour—an examination of critical interpreters, cases, and constitutional

provisions on the ground in 12 different states encompassing every

region of the continental United States. The book, however, is not an

analysis of the importance of regional constitutional politics on consti-

tutional development, but rather a series of observations designed to

illustrate how American constitutionalism manifests itself in a variety

of ways inf‌lected by its situation in the states. The seeds planted by

the constitution’s framework develop into the same American species

of plants, but their local soil, water, and sunlight conditions have

made them f‌lower differently.

Substantive issues that Amar addresses on the interpretive front

in the book’s f‌irst section includethe problems of crafting a multira-

cial union (Illinois), the modest populism of the constitution

embraced by Alabama’s Hugo Black, the practical reasoning of for-

mer politician and New Yorker Robert Jackson, and Justice Ken-

nedy’s gradual evolution toward a Californian ideal of equality. The

second section of the book uses landmark cases as both interpretive

and geographic lenses. He explores the meaning of segregation as

a form of American apartheid outside the south in a chapter on

Brown, considers the central democratic importance of political dis-

sent in a discussion of Iowa’s Tinker v. Des Moines, and explores the

relationship between state and federal constitutional law through

Florida’s litigation culminating in Bush v. Gore. The f‌inal section

addresses particularly vexed constitutional provisions in geographic

situ: Ohio’s and Texas’s engagement with presidents and the problem

of mandates and succession, Wyoming and the gendered and racial-

ized implications of the Second Amendment, Massachusetts and the

Book Reviews 457