The Framers’ greatest gift to us was a Constitution for a free, self-determining people. Contrary to what one would infer from modern practice, it was not the exclusive purview of lawyers. It was, instead, a citizen’s Constitution. Its purpose was to empower the American experiment: to enable ordinary, well-informed, self-interested members of the body politic to control their own destiny. In a mere 8000 words (Obama’s healthcare “reform,” by contrast, spans 2000 pages), it ingeniously built a government of the people constructed for people wary of government.

“More than anything else,” opines Seth Lipsky, more than “race, religion, national origin, language,” our fundamental law commands our loyalty and “defines what it means to be an American.” In The Citizen’s Constitution, he brings that law alive—though not necessarily to life. For it is not Lipsky’s purpose to probe the scrimmage-line between the “living Constitution” venerated by legal scholars of the American Left and the “dead” version endorsed by originalists such as Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. As one of our age’s great journalists, Lipsky is moved less by the rich jurisprudential legacy than by the Constitution as constant guide in the American story. Landmark Supreme Court decisions make cameo appearances throughout the book, but no more than that. To dwell on their endless twists, nuances, and contradictions is the point of a law-school text.

Lipsky writes, rather, for the layman, with a craftsman’s eye for what matters most, the simple