The Constitution on Trial: A Case for the Living Over the Dead is a searing, uncompromising examination of America's most sacred political artifact. In this groundbreaking work, Jawanna Dean dismantles the illusion that the United States Constitution is a living, breathing document. She exposes it instead as a historical relic?an unsigned contract, authored by a small circle of eighteenth-century men, imposed on generations who never consented to it and who were never intended to be protected by it. With the sharp precision of a legal analyst and the fearless clarity of someone who has survived the consequences of constitutional stagnation, Dean argues that a modern nation cannot evolve while governed by the assumptions, blind spots, and prejudices of the dead.
This book places the Constitution under the same scrutiny the legal system imposes on every binding agreement. It challenges its authenticity, its admissibility, and its legitimacy under contemporary standards of evidence, consent, contract law, and public accountability. It reveals how the document has been mythologized through education, patriotism, and political ritual?shielded from critique by a culture that equates questioning with treason. Dean confronts the racial contract embedded within the social contract, exposing the ways literacy laws, exclusionary politics, and economic manipulation allowed the Constitution to function as a tool of control rather than a covenant of protection.
Drawing on history, law, sociology, and lived experience, Dean shows how constitutional amendments operate as cosmetic patches on failing fabric, how foundational rights have been twisted into conditional privileges, and how a nation powered by artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, modern warfare, and global finance cannot be governed by men who rode horses and feared literacy among the people they enslaved.
Yet this is not a book of destruction; it is a book of reconstruction. Dean presents a vision for a real-time Constitution authored by the living?transparent, collaborative, technologically competent, accountable, and rooted in housing justice, labor equity, AI regulation, environmental protection, and reparations. She proposes a new framework grounded in renewal cycles, opt-out mechanisms, public authorship, and human dignity.
The Constitution on Trial is a declaration, an indictment, and an invitation. It asks every reader to choose between worshipping paper or protecting people. It calls for intellectual rebellion, not violence; awareness, not chaos. It insists that the living must reclaim their right to write the future instead of obeying the ghosts of the past.
Jawanna Dean has written a work that will be studied, debated, resisted, and ultimately remembered. It is not a book for the timid. It is a book for those who understand that courage begins with thinking?and that a nation cannot evolve unless its people do.
