Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, family law, and reproductive rights and justice. She is a co-author (with Andrew Weissman) of the New York Times #1 bestseller, The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary, as well as The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, which will be released by Simon and Schuster in May 2026. Murray’s writing has appeared in a range of legal and lay publications, including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. She is a legal analyst for MSNOW, and is a host of Strict Scrutiny, a Crooked Media podcast about the Supreme Court and legal culture. Murray is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia. Following law school, she served as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor and the Honorable Stefan Underhill.
It feels like we’re living in a moment where the basic premises of the Constitution–limited government, restraint on government authority, respect for rights, the prospect of citizenship–are being renegotiated in real time. These are important moments–and we all need to be equipped with the tools to engage effectively. The Framers of the Constitution feared the prospect of a too-powerful monarch who could easily become a tyrant. They feared the prospect of military forces in our cities and towns terrorizing residents. They recognized that a powerful government was necessary for a thriving country, but could also be an impediment to true democracy. They wanted to strike a balance between government strength and government restraint. That was the whole point of the Constitution. In this moment, we need to think critically about whether we are striking that balance.
I think most Americans think of the Constitution as conferring a set of rights on individuals–and it does do that, obviously. But, as originally written and imagined, the Constitution wasn’t intended to confer rights–it was intended to restrain the federal government. When they sat down to write the Constitution in 1787, the Framers were working through some trauma. They had endured the tyranny of the British Crown and Parliament for years as colonists, so they had a deep-seated fear of a powerful, centralized government. But they’d also just been through the Revolutionary War, where the governing structure was a loose coalition of the former colonies/states.
That experience made them recognize that a strong central government was necessary for the new nation, but they remained fearful of making the central government so powerful that it would tip into tyranny and run roughshod over citizens and the states. The Constitution was the answer–a document that structured the federal government horizontally into three branches, with each branch being able to check the authority of the others, and vertically, dividing power between the federal government and the states.
Put simply, the original Constitution is about restraining the federal government–keeping it from doing too much. The rights part came later, when critics of the Constitution argued that explicit protections for individual rights were necessary–they were convinced that simply dividing power between the three branches of the federal government and between the federal government and the states would be enough. They pushed for an explicit account of the rights that each person retained under the new Constitution–rights that the federal government could not infringe upon. And later, after the Civil War, recognizing that states, as much as the federal government, could run roughshod over individual rights, the people insisted on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to insulate individual rights from encroachment by the states.
All of this suggests that, from the start, the Constitution wasn’t perfect or complete. It has been a work in progress, with the people frequently weighing in to insist upon protections for themselves and their prerogatives.
I don’t know that I am necessarily the arbiter of which ideas need to be distilled and made more legible. If we, as a people, are asking questions about certain issues, then those are the issues that require more clarity. The difficulty right now is that there are so many issues that people want to be read in on. In my view, that lack of clarity speaks to our failure, as a country, to prioritize civics education in a meaningful way. When I was a kid, there was Schoolhouse Rock, and every fourth grader in my state had to take a basic class in American government. In the 2000s, we abandoned much of that educational content in order to meet other metrics of academic success. Maybe those choices were good ones in the moment, but we’re paying for it now with a generation of Americans who have an uneven understanding of how our government actually works.
I do not negotiate with myself, meaning I try not to think about all the reasons why I shouldn’t go for something or put myself forward for something. There are plenty of people who will do that for me. They don’t need my help.
Sherrilyn Ifill, Barbara Jordan, Justice Sotomayor.
My Kindle
I love that everything I used to love in the 1990s is coming back again. I am here for it.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. There isn’t another book that so clearly communicates the social (and legal) role of marriage in structuring women’s lives. And it’s hilarious and beautifully written. It has informed my thinking about relationships and my scholarship on marriage and its alternatives.
