Jonathan Gienapp

About

Jonathan Gienapp is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and associate professor of history and associate professor of law at Stanford University. He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States, with a primary scholarly focus on the origins and development of the US Constitution and the intersections of modern legal debates with constitutional interpretation and theory.

Gienapp is the author of The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2018), which rethinks the conventional creation story of the US Constitution by exploring how the earliest years of the document’s existence were transformed by founding-era Americans’ understanding of it. He is also the author of Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale University Press, 2024), which mounts a comprehensive historical critique of the theory of constitutional originalism. He is currently at work on a new book on the forgotten history of the Preamble to the US Constitution.

In connection with his scholarship and teaching, he has conducted work for the National Constitution Center and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, is a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice, and is a member of the Stanford Civics Initiative.