Jill Lepore on her Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution’

Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize Monday for “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution.”

Lepore is also a professor at Harvard Law School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist “New York Burning” (2005). This week’s announcement marked her first time securing the top award.

“I stacked some wood yesterday,” she said in a phone call Tuesday. “That was my celebration. I took a break from writing.”

According to the Pulitzer Prize Board, Lepore’s winning work offers a “lively and engaging narrative that investigates why the Constitution is so difficult to amend, including a review of noteworthy failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups.” In an interview, edited for length and clarity, Lepore reflected on why that topic has such resonance, plus she shared her hopes for the book's legacy.

Any thoughts on why this book has had such impact?

When the book came out, I did a lot of public events all over the country, and people were just really desperate to know more about the Constitution. It’s not incredibly well taught in schools anymore, if at all. And to the degree that people know anything about the Constitution, it’s that it’s sort of the original document, and then maybe a couple of Supreme Court decisions that they’ve heard about.

The book is based on a ton of archival research and the stories of ordinary people and their attempts to amend and interpret the Constitution, and I think for most Americans that is really quite unfamiliar. There’s a real hunger for knowledge about how we got to where we are right now. There has been a really big hole in people’s knowledge of the history of the Constitution.

How does the book tie into the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that we’re celebrating this year?

I wrote the book after writing a book that came out in 2018, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” and a lot of the email that I got from readers was especially appreciative of stuff that was in the book about the Constitution. It made me think there was probably room for a companion book that was solely an account of the Constitution.

And, yes, I did intend for the book to come out for the 250th, or a little in advance of it, partly because it occurred to me that something we would miss in celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this July is that, before that — starting, in fact, in January — the states drafted their [own] constitutions.

Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, New York had already been drafting their constitutions and writing declarations of rights and declarations of independence, and we don’t really celebrate the 250th anniversary of written constitutionalism in the United States. I think that’s a crucial piece of what we need to be celebrating and commemorating.

The question I was hoping to introduce into the public discussion of this anniversary is: Why is it that we still have state constitutions and amend them all the time and we don’t amend the U.S. Constitution? It’s been almost impossible to do that for most of our history.

Do you see any hope going forward that what was supposed to be a living, growing document will get any easier to change?

I think it’s changing all the time. It’s just not changing in ways it was intended to change. 

I mean, the Constitution has changed tremendously just in the first year and a few months of the second Trump administration. Just think of the number of really landmark Supreme Court decisions that have turned on its head what previous courts thought the Constitution meant. We’re looking at more of those decisions coming down the pike. Even something like birthright citizenship.

The constitution is changing all the time. We just don’t change it by way of formal amendment done by the people. Because when the amendment mechanism is broken, the Supreme Court has far more power than it ordinarily does.

My book isn’t really an account of attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution. That is a big part of it, but it is really an attempt to understand the relationship between the people’s desire to change the Constitution and the Court’s execution of its power to change the Constitution. Increasingly, what we’re seeing is an executive branch that takes upon itself the power to amend the Constitution, which is not part of our constitutional order.