An argument against rule by the dead.

In January of the year 897, the reigning pope had his predecessor's corpse pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, propped upright, and put on trial in Rome. A deacon answered the prosecution in the dead man's voice, and the sentence was carried out on the body. History treats the Cadaver Synod as a medieval freak show. Barbarous Ancestors treats it as a method, and follows that method into the marble courtroom where it now decides American life.

From the Cadaver Synod of 897 to the modern Supreme Court, this book traces the recurring practice of governing the living by the reconstructed intentions of the deceased. Constitutional originalism claims the founding text means what its ratifying generation understood it to mean, and nothing since. David Boles calls that claim what the historical record shows it to be: a séance performed in robes, whose recovered voices keep agreeing with the majority that summoned them.

The evidence arrives from every field that ever tried the method. The best physicians in the republic bled George Washington by the book of a doctor dead for centuries. Imperial China graded five hundred years of its finest minds against one twelfth-century edition of Confucius. The concert hall invented an authentic Bach, the forger's market sold Europe a Donation of Constantine that Constantine never wrote, the King James Bible on the courtroom table is an edition of an edition, and two farm girls in Hydesville, New York founded the industry of talking to the dead that the séance court still practices.

The founders testify for the prosecution. Jefferson wrote that the earth belongs to the living. Madison spent his last years editing the convention notes the doctrine now mines for certainty, and the generation that supposedly froze its meaning wrote an amendment machine into the document itself.