Two-hundred twenty two years ago today -- September 17, 1787, thirty-nine brave men in Philadelphia signed the United States Constitution, sending it to the States for ratification.
From Keeping Faith with the Constitution, by Goodwin Liu, Pamela Karlan and Christopher Schroeder:
The reason the United States Constitution is the world’s most enduring written constitution is not simply the genius of fifty-five men who met in Philadelphia in 1787. Rather, it is the way that generation after generation of Americans has made the Constitution ours. The Constitution endures because its meaning and application have been shaped by an ongoing process of interpretation. That process includes both judicial interpretation and transformations in constitutional understanding pressed by political leaders and ordinary citizens throughout our history. Our Constitution retains its vitality because it has proven adaptable to the changing conditions and evolving norms of our society. Its words and principles still resonate centuries after they were written because time and again, as Justice Holmes urged, we have interpreted the Constitution in light of "what this country has become." Americans of all backgrounds can wholeheartedly take an oath to support and defend the Constitution when they are naturalized, join the armed forces, gain admission to the bar, or are sworn into elective office not because of how our founding text was understood in 1789, or even in 1870, but because of how we understand it today.
Justice William Brennan, 1983:
The Framers discerned fundamental principles through struggles against particular malefactions of the Crown; the struggle shapes the particular contours of the articulated principles. But our acceptance of the fundamental principles has not and should not bind us to those precise, at times anachronistic, contours. Successive generations of Americans have continued to respect these fundamental choices and adopt them as their own guide to evaluating quite different historical practices. Each generation has the choice to overrule or add to the fundamental principles enunciated by the Framers; the Constitution can be amended or it can be ignored. Yet with respect to its fundamental principles, the text has suffered neither fate. Thus, if I may borrow the words of an esteemed predecessor, Justice Robert Jackson, the burden of judicial interpretation is to translate "the majestic generalities of the Bill of Rights, conceived as part of the pattern of liberal government in the eighteenth century, into concrete restraints on officials dealing with the problems of the twentieth century . . ."
Current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as twentieth-century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be: What do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs. What the constitutional fundamentals meant to the wisdom of other times cannot be the measure to the vision of our time. Similarly, what those fundamentals mean for us, our descendants will learn, cannot be the measure to the vision of their time. This realization is not a novel one of my own creation.
To quote from one of the opinions of our Court, Weems v. United States,
written nearly a century ago:
Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle to be vital must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth. This is peculiarly true of constitutions. They are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions. They are, to use the words of Chief Justice Marshall, "designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it." The future is their care and provision for events of good and bad tendencies of which no prophecy can be made. In the application of a constitution, therefore, our contemplation cannot be only of what has been but of what may be.
Or, of course, we can celebrate in song:
Finally, click here to download an MP3 of the entire Constitution, as read by the late Prof. David Currie of The University of Chicago Law School. It will occupy 50:08 on your iPod, and every American should have a copy of the Constitution handy at all times. It's your Constitution, after all.