As we are about to celebrate Constitution Day in 2026, our latest guest on the Anchoring Truths Podcast says we no longer live under the Constitution as the people who wrote and ratified it understood it. That guest is Ilan Wurman, the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota.
The topic we will be discussing his Wurman’s new book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction. Wurman argues that modern doctrine has drifted far from original meaning. Courts, he says, no longer play the limited judicial role the Founders designed. Congress’s commerce and spending powers now underwrite a vast regulatory and welfare state that would have stunned the ratifiers—much of the New Deal order included. Lawmakers have also handed enormous authority to agencies, helping create what he calls a deep state that governs daily life. And war and foreign-affairs powers that originally favored Congress now sit mostly with the President. We unpack those arguments and more.
Besides his latest work, Wurman is the author of The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (2020) and A Debt against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (2017), as well as a leading casebook on administrative law. He is also the co-host of a new podcast, Rationally Based. He splits his time between Saint Paul, Minnesota, and rural Arizona.
Follow Wurman on X.com here.
Purchase The Constitution of 1789 here.
