On Thursday, Sept. 19, in celebration of Constitution Day, Professor George Thomas gave a lecture at Knox College about the unwritten ideas that guide the interpretation of the Constitution.

Thomas is the Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions and Director of the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College. He is also the author of, ‘The (Un)Written Constitution,’ published in 2021.

“In interpreting a written constitution, our written constitution, we inescapably rely on unwritten understandings to make sense of the written text. It’s a feature of our written constitution, and our most important constitutional debates turn on unwritten understandings,” Thomas said. “This means our understandings of the written constitution are going to rely on judgments that are not themselves rooted in text.”

Since 2004, Constitution Day has been observed nationally on Sept. 17 in honor of the day the Constitutional Convention signed the U.S. Constitution. Knox has held events in commemoration of this day for the past several years, most recently a debate held for Constitution Day 2023.

In his lecture, Thomas explained why it is essential in the judicial process to interpret not only the written text of the Constitution, but also the unwritten ideas in the document.

“The very nature of the written Constitution relies on unwritten ideas not, I want to be clear, because we’re trying to rewrite the Constitution to make it accord with our policy preferences, but because the text does not explain itself,” Thomas said.

According to Thomas, some of the most important constitutional debates occur outside of the judicial system. These debates represent the political and constitutional judgements of political actors, rather than the legal judgement of jurists.

“There’s really no safe space on which we can stand and simply say, well, the text just settles the question for me. Rather, we have to make judgments about why that text means what we think it means and why the understanding we’re putting forward is, we think, the best understanding of the text,” Thomas said.