Jack Rakove

Stanford University

Thursday, April 30, 2015  |  4:15 pm  |  Main 212, Jamail Room

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James Madison’s ideas about executive power were the least formed parts of his constitutional theory in the 1780s. But in the 1790s, he became increasingly concerned with the political capacity of the presidency, and as secretary of state and president, he sought to implement his understanding of how an American republican executive should act. This talk will consider Madison’s “legacy” in this one realm of constitutional government where his reputation has never stood high.

Jack Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Law at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. He was educated at Haverford College, where he earned a B.A. in History in 1968, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in History in 1975 and studied under Bernard Bailyn. At Stanford he teaches courses in early American history and the origins and interpretation of the Constitution. He is the author of six books: The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979); James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (revised edition, Addison, Wesley, Longman, 2001, 2006); Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996), which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History, the 1997 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and the 1998 Society of the Cincinnati Book Prize; Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997); The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. He is the editor of Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); James Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, September 1999); a collection of scholarly essays on The Unfinished Election of 2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001); The Federalist: The Essential Essays (Boston: Bedford Books, 2003); and Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006). He has contributed chapters to numerous scholarly collections, and written essays for various journals, including Perspectives in American History, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. He has also published numerous op-ed articles in such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and New York Times. In November 1998 he testified at the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearings on the Background and History of Impeachment. He has served as a consultant and expert witness in several cases involving Indian land claims in New York State dating to the 1780s, and has written four amicus curiae briefs for the Supreme Court, including one cited by Justice Stevens in D.C. v. Heller (2008), the leading Second Amendment case. He has also been involved with various media projects, including Dateline ‘87, a fourteen-episode radio program on the Constitutional Convention; Liberty’s Kids, a forty-episode animated cartoon history of the American Revolution produced by DIC Entertainment in beautiful downtown Burbank, California for PBS; and Whose Curse Is Worse: The Red Sox and Cubs on Trial, which aired on ESPN in September 2004.  He has appeared on the News Hour, the Daily Show in May 2010 with Jon Stewart, and numerous radio interviews. (The appearance on the Daily Show was part of that program’s sample episode for its 2010 Emmy.)

In 2003-2004, Rakove was president of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic.  He has also served on the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1999 and the American Philosophical Society since 2007. During 2006-2007, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. In 2012 he joined the board of directors at James Madison’s Montpelier. He has been a visiting professor at the law schools of New York University, Tel Aviv University, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Professor Rakove’s next two books are A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison, which is based on the Julian Rothbaum lectures he presented at the University of Oklahoma in 2009; and Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, to be published by Oxford University Press as part of its series on Unalienable Rights.

Rakove lives on the Stanford campus with his wife, Helen, an attorney who recently retired from Hoge, Fenton, Jones and Appel in San Jose. Their older son, Rob, graduated from Stanford, completed his Ph.D. in American history at the University of Virginia, and is currently a lecturer in the International Relations program at Stanford and the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned Nations (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Their younger son, Dan, graduated from Princeton and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and is now a Foreign Service officer serving on the Kazakhstan desk in the Department of State.