Your Constitutional Right to Be a Pirate

A.J. Jacobs has become famous for coming up with great ideas and taking them way too far. While researching his best-selling 2007 book, The Year of Living Biblically, he literally followed every single rule in the Bible, growing a huge beard and avoiding clothes made from two kinds of fibers. For Drop Dead Healthy in 2012, he tested every diet and exercise regimen he could find, on a two-year quest to become “the healthiest man alive.” He wrote parts of the book while walking on a treadmill, experimented with “extreme chewing,” completed his first sprint triathlon, and lost more than 20 pounds.

This past May, A.J. published The Year of Living Constitutionally. His latest extreme mission was inspired by Supreme Court rulings in 2022 on women’s rights and gun rights, which ignited a national conversation about how to interpret the Constitution—and A.J. decided to find out what would happen if he interpreted it as literally as possible. He exercised his right, as an American citizen, to bear an eighteenth-century musket in the streets of New York. He quartered soldiers in his apartment, much to his wife’s consternation. And—as he describes in the following piece—he petitioned Congress to become a state-sanctioned pirate, otherwise known as a “privateer,” with permission to detain enemy ships.

Privateers are the unsung heroes of the American Revolution. We probably wouldn’t celebrate the Fourth of July without them. So, while A.J. acknowledges parts of his experiment are absurd, his goal is a serious one: to fully understand, and therefore preserve, the democracy that was founded on this day 248 years ago. It’s a goal we admire at The Free Press. So this holiday, we bring you A.J.—tricorn hat, musket, and all—on the art of living constitutionally. 

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