By the People is mostly about the law, and I am not a lawyer. I am philosophically comfortable intruding into an alien domain—just as war is too important to be left to generals, the law is too important to be left to lawyers—but I came to this project aware that just reading a lot of books about the law wouldn’t save me from grievous errors. I needed the help of people who have the professional training and experience I lack.
I began by going to Chip Mellor, president of the Institute for Justice, to tell him my idea for the book and ask whether it made any sense. He was intrigued by my idea, which he summarized on that first visit as “putting sugar into the government’s gas tank,” and agreed to help. Subsequently, he and the Institute for Justice’s staff were invaluable in getting me started. I had the good fortune of already knowing others who are leading academic experts in the topics I was taking up, plus one eminent practitioner, a judge emeritus on a federal circuit court of appeals. As usual in such endeavors, people who were already colleagues were able to point me to others whom I did not know but who were generous in their response to my requests for them to review drafts.
Before I list the names of these people who were so much help to me, imagine that this standard caveat is in a headline-size font, all caps: The errors that remain are mine alone. For example, brilliant constitutional scholars reviewed chapter 1. They made many suggestions, many of which I incorporated into the text. But they also suggested alterations to my narrative that I reluctantly ignored so that the chapter could be kept of manageable length, knowing that I could tell the truth about the constitutional revolution but didn’t have space for the whole truth. At points when I erred, leaving out complications that should have been included, it was my call. The same choices among options had to be made for all of the chapters, and they were all my calls. It should also be kept in mind that none of the people listed below saw more than parts of the manuscript—in some cases, they saw only a few pages.
With that in mind, I want to express my gratitude, in alphabetical order, to Randy Barnett, Dana Berliner, Clint Bolick, Scott Bullock, Matthew Christiansen, Greg Conko, Christopher DeMuth, Richard Epstein, Sean Farhang, Michael Greve, Philip Howard, Robert Kaiser, William Maurer, Chip Mellor, Michael Milbin, Clark Neily, Walter Olson, Norman Ornstein, George Priest, Jonathan Rauch, Jeff Rowes, Timothy Sandefur, Paul Sherman, Michael Strain, Stan Veuger, Peter Wehner, Adam White, Stephen Williams, and Joseph Yalch.
My editor at Crown Forum, Roger Scholl, had no choice but to read the whole thing. Thanks to Roger for his enthusiasm about this odd project, and for an editorial eye that materially improved both my thinking and my writing. Rachelle Mandik meticulously copyedited the manuscript, and Barbara Sturman came up with a striking book design for it.
Thanks to Caroline Kitchens, who took a variety of tasks off my back at AEI. Amanda Urban, to whom By the People is dedicated, completed her third decade watching sedulously over the book-writing part of my career. Thanks to Carrol and Tom Noorman and the rest of the crew for providing the seclusion I needed when I was writing some particularly difficult parts of the book.
The acknowledgments section of almost every book I have written since 1990 has included a word of thanks to my professional home, the American Enterprise Institute. This is a good occasion to be more explicit and emphatic. During nineteen years under the leadership of Chris DeMuth and then six years under that of Arthur Brooks, AEI has been my safe haven. We live in an era when social-science departments on college campuses have become notoriously unwelcoming to people who look like they might not share the received wisdom. AEI has given me given freedom to write on whatever topic I choose, presenting whatever conclusions I think justified by the evidence. When my work has drawn the kind of criticism that has caused other institutions to throw personnel (including eminent personnel) overboard, AEI’s executives and trustees have not even flinched. I am honored to be part of such a splendid institution.
As I worked on By the People, my wife and chief editor, Catherine Cox, watched with growing apprehension. “No more mister nice guy,” I would say ominously, and then disappear back into my lair. When it was all over, and she had applied her red ink to the final chapters, she told me that I had been frightening her for nothing. That she could read her husband calling for massive civil disobedience, which, if successful, might destabilize the polity, and call it “nothing,” says something about what thirty-two years of my company have done to her sensibilities. She agrees, but says she loves me anyway, which is all that matters.