Jonathan Gienapp

Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law. 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 (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), 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. It investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning altered how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities, showing how these changes created a distinct kind of constitutional culture, the consequences of which endure to this day. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 and a Spectator USA Book of the Year for 2018. It was reviewed in The Nation, was the subject of a symposium at Balkinization, and was chosen for the 2019 Publius Symposium co-hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and the Stanford Center for Law and History. He wrote about some of the book's central themes in an op-ed for the Boston Globe, and has discussed the book on "New Books in History," "The Age of Jackson Podcast," "Law's Dimensions," and "Riches & Power," as well as in interviews for Current and the Harvard University Press Blog.

His second book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale University Press, 2024), mounts 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. He wrote about the book's themes in connection to the current Supreme Court. The book has been reviewed in several high-profile venues. The Washington Post declared that "this brilliant book is . . . the most forceful objection to originalism to date, and it offers a radically new understanding of the intriguingly unfamiliar territory that is our nation’s past." The New Republic said the book "injects a fresh, powerful new argument against originalism into the debate." It was also selected for The New Yorker as a book that sheds light on the current state of the United States. Gienapp was interviewed about the book on "New Books Network" and for Stanford Humanities & Sciences, and participated in a National Constitution Center Town Hall debate on the book. The book builds on prior work Gienapp has done on originalism and history, such as his article, "Written Constitutionalism, Past and Present," published in Law and History Review, which was identified as one of the best works of recent scholarship in constitutional law in a review at Jotwell, two essays that appeared on Process: A Blog for American History, published by the Organization of American Historians, that have been widely cited and discussed, and an article on historical method and the New Originalism published in the Fordham Law Review. More recently, in an article that was part of a symposium on his book, he has drawn out themes from the book to challenge originalists' longstanding argument that legal interpretation does not require historical contextualism. His work on originalism has been featured in The New York Times.

Gienapp's next book is on the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, currently entitled "We the People of the United States: The Struggle over Popular Sovereignty and Nationhood." It tells the story of the Preamble's early vitality and eventual descent into political and legal irrelevance as a way of exploring the broader struggle over popular sovereignty and national union in the early United States. It probes the often entwined debates over popular rule, sovereignty, federalism, and constitutionalism in the nation's earliest years to understand the full meanings of the Constitution's opening words: "We the People of the United States." Central to this project is the recovery of a distinct, yet forgotten, vision of constitutionalism that predominated at the American Founding and treated the Preamble as the central feature of the Constitution. It was most vigorously championed by the leading constitutional framers, James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris. Even though Wilson and Morris are largely unknown today, no two delegates to the Constitutional Convention played a more significant role in shaping the final Constitution, and in the years immediately following the Convention their particular conception of the Constitution was influential. Over the course of subsequent decades, however, their vision was quietly supplanted and largely pushed underground. Nonetheless, it reverberated for years to come, motivating abolitionists and other political activists eager to harness constitutional power to change an American order they deemed deeply unjust. Bringing this vision of the Constitution back into focus and understanding both its original vitality as well as how and why it disappeared offers an unfamiliar and revealing account of early U.S. constitutionalism, one that invites us to look upon the Preamble to the Constitution anew. For a preview of the books' themes, see various articles and book chapters he has published on the idea of constitutional nationalism at the Founding, the early Preamble, intellectual differences among early constitutional nationalists, and Gouverneur Morris's nationalist constitutionalism.

Gienapp has also published a range of articles, book chapters, and essays on early American constitutionalism, politics, and intellectual history, modern constitutional interpretation, and the study of the history of ideas. They have appeared in venues such as the Journal of the Early Republic, Law and History Review, The New England Quarterly, and Constitutional Commentary. He co-organized a symposium for the Fordham Law Review, entitled "The Federalist Constitution," that explores the oft-overlooked constitutional ideas of the nationalist-minded politicians and jurists who initially held power and influence at the time of the Constitution's creation.

Gienapp has lectured widely on the U.S. Constitution and the American Founding era. Among other appearances, he discussed the Constitution's history in an episode of the podcast, Writ Large, participated in a National Constitution Center Town Hall, "The Founders' Library: Intellectual Sources of the Constitution," and a Constitution Day discussion of the Constitutional Convention, discussed originalism on the current Supreme Court in a Brennan Center Live event, talked about originalism and current legal issues on Stanford Legal, explored political culture in the early American republic on an episode of Ben Franklin's World, discussed James Wilson's contributions to U.S. constitutionalism in a webinar hosted by the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, was interviewed about the history of election disputes in the United States for The New York Times, and discussed the history of minority rule in the United States on NPR's All Things Considered. He also helped compile the National Constitution Center's Founders' Library.

He is a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice and has contributed to a number of historians' amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States. He is also one of the founding editors of the Journal of American Constitutional History where he serves as a senior editorial advisor.

In addition to his appointments in the History department and at Stanford Law School, Gienapp is a member of the Stanford Civics Initiative.

Gienapp is accepting graduate students to the Ph.D. program in History who are interested in working on all aspects of early American history and U.S. constitutional and legal history, including especially those students interested in Stanford's J.D./Ph.D. program in law and history. More information on the department's graduate program in United States history, designed to answer most common questions about the application process and the current state of the program, can be found here. More information on the J.D./Ph.D. program.