Dennis Goldford's The American Constitution and the Debates over Originalism provides a helpful overview of the originalism debates of the 1980s and uses those debates to investigate general problems in constitutional theory and with a goal of transcending the dichotomy between originalism and nonoriginalism. Although illuminating, Goldford fails to offer a persuasive alternative to originalist and nonoriginalist theories of constitutional interpretation because he does not grapple with the primary problem that those theories are designed to solve, the problem of constitutional and interpretive authority.