Jill Lepore

Or when the Supreme Court said, you know, in Griswold versus Connecticut in 1965, there's a right to privacy that extends to birth control for married couples.

You know, conservatives said that's not in the Constitution.

That's an amendment to the Constitution.

Usually when you say something, the court is amending the Constitution, you are denying the legitimacy of the change rather than accepting the legitimacy of the change.

Right, right.

Yeah.

So it was really a new idea.

And it's not new to the Constitution of 1787.

It's new in the constitutions of 1776.

So it's a great time to be talking about this because we think of this 250th anniversary of the country as celebrating 250 years since the Declaration of Independence.

But of course, the first state constitutions were adopted in 1776, beginning in January of 1776.

And the Declaration of Independence follows from them and, in fact, borrows a fair amount from them.

So the states, the new states, former colonies, had no government when the royal governors fled after the war started in 1775.

And

They had to make some decisions and do some things.

So they started forming governments in 1776.

And John Adams, who was in the Continental Congress, said, you know, they should all write constitutions and they should basically be the same because we believe in written constitutions.

Adams said England's constitution is unwritten, but we think the states should write down their constitutions.

And people generally also believe those constitutions should include declarations of rights.

And increasingly over time, this wasn't by no means the case entirely across the first state constitutions, but increasingly a set of expectations emerged about what a written constitution is in a republic.