The Heritage Guide to the Constitution Editorial Process and Editorial Board

The Heritage Guide to the Constitution was a collaborative effort of more than 150 authors, who were advised by a practitioner, judicial, and academic boards. My co-author John Malcolm and I described the process in our editors’ note:

Due to the size of this project, we established a fairly rigorous process to ensure that essays of the highest quality were reviewed, edited, and revised in a timely fashion. Josh Blackman served as the Senior Editor and John G. Malcolm served as the Executive Editor. Our editors at Heritage included Seth Lucas, Jack Fitzhenry, Jenna Hageman, Meaghen McManus, John Osorio, Jameson Payne, and Alexander Phipps. We were also fortunate to have student editors who served on the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Texas Review of Law & Politics, as well as the Heritage Foundation intern program. We also assembled three external advisory boards. The Judicial Advisory Board included eighteen federal circuit courts of appeals judges, the Practitioner Advisory Board included thirteen Supreme Court advocates, and the Academic Advisory Board included ten law professors. All of the editors and advisors are listed on the masthead.

The publication process went through six rigorous phases. Phase 1 began in early 2022. Over the course of a year, every essay from the second edition was carefully scrutinized by our internal and external reviewers. During this process, we invited back authors to revise their essays and also invited many new authors to join the project. Moreover, we subdivided some essays that covered several clauses, thus creating more opportunities for new authors. We tried to develop a mix of senior professors, junior scholars, practitioners with relevant experience, and distinguished jurists. In Phase 2, authors were asked to deliver the first draft of their revised essays by the middle of 2023. We provided the authors with detailed guidelines to ensure that the essays were roughly uniform in structure and style and provided the proper focus on originalism. We are grateful to the authors for following our standards.

In Phase 3, throughout late 2023 and 2024, the substance of the first drafts was carefully reviewed by Blackman, Malcolm, and our internal editors at Heritage. Each essay was also referred to our external board for a double-blind review: Reviewers did not know the identity of the authors, and the authors did not know the identity of the reviewers of their respective essays. The external reviewers provided line edits, suggestions to add or remove material, and broader comments.

In Phase 4, during 2024, feedback was provided to the authors in an anonymized fashion so that they did not know who provided the comments. We are again thankful to the authors for considering and implementing many of our proposed edits.

Phase 5 began in mid-2024. Here, the essays were closely proofread, cite-checked, and bluebooked by Bill Poole, Heritage Senior Editor extraordinaire. External sources were digitized and archived to ensure citation accuracy.

Phase 6 commenced in 2025 as the essays were finalized and prepared for publication. We exerted our best efforts to catch all possible errors but still take responsibility for any mistakes that may have slipped through the process. The final text spanned approximately 500,000 words—more than fifty times the length of the Constitution and amendments. The complete Guide was delivered to the publisher in July 2025.

Here are the distinguished members of our editorial board:

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