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Historian Jill Lepore frames amendments as the people's way to remake the Constitution
Summary
At a Concord Museum forum, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore said amendments—more than court rulings—are the clearest expression of popular constitutional change and traced patterns of amendment, failure, and substitution by courts and executives.
Jill Lepore, a professor at Harvard and staff writer at The New Yorker, told a Concord Museum audience that she wrote We the People now to re-center amendments in the history of American constitutionalism. "The Constitution is in fact the spirit of our belief about what the Constitution is," Lepore said, arguing that amendment attempts reveal how "the people" have sought to change governing rules over time.
Lepore noted the federal Constitution has 27 ratified amendments but said roughly 12,000 amendment proposals have been introduced in Congress, signaling frequent popular appetite for change despite a high procedural bar. She told moderator Ryan Hanley that much of modern constitutional change has occurred through judicial interpretation or executive action rather than Article V amendment, altering how citizens engage with constitutional politics.
Why it matters: Lepore framed amendment as a democratic practice—"mending" the text rather than treating the Constitution as an untouchable relic. Her account places contemporary debates about judiciary power, executive action and even AI governance in a longer arc of when Americans have sought to revise foundational law.
