Continue reading below

The Constitution, like any other document considered sacred and revered, has aspects that at least appear deeply peculiar. Although its text outlines our most fundamental rights, it also contains many other provisions that likely come across as strange and archaic. Consider, for instance, those parts that allow the United States to authorize privateers or delineate under what circumstances American citizens can accept titles of nobility or be forced to house soldiers against their will.

Such clauses beg for a detailed explanation rooting them in the broader Constitutional framework that governs our society. After all, the Third Amendment, which prohibits the quartering of soldiers, was one of the precedents cited in Griswold v. Connecticut, which established that Americans have an inherent right to privacy under the Constitution, and the roles of the president and Congress in authorizing privateers sheds light on each respective branch’s authority to exercise other war powers, such as the question of who decides when the United States can engage in military action on land. Unfortunately, “The Odd Clauses’’ does not adequately make those connections. While it does serve to shed some additional light, it only flickers and never clearly illuminates.

The book is composed of 10 essays addressing each of the “Odd Clauses’’ in turn. While its author, Jay Wexler, a professor at Boston University School of Law, clearly has an understanding and appreciation for his subject matter, he is never sure how to treat it. This is not to say that the book does not provide its moments of entertainment and insight. It traces the clause prohibiting a Bill of Attainder, when someone is sentenced to death by legislation rather than by trial, from its roots in medieval England on through its brief appearance in the United States with the backing of a surprisingly bloodthirsty Thomas Jefferson before it re-emerges in the present day in litigation over pulling government funding of ACORN, a shuttered controversial grass-roots advocacy group for lower-income families. But these moments tend to get obscured by a constant barrage of mediocre comedic tangents and political rants, not to mention tedious excursions into the academic literature. The result is that the reader learns as much about the author as about the clauses of the Constitution that are the subject of his book.

Constitutional law as a subject tends to be written about in a manner that is inaccessible to an educated layperson. When there are attempts to make it more accessible, the result often comes across as the type of benign civics lesson that would be more appropriate in “Schoolhouse Rock’’ than a serious work of nonfiction. This is unfortunate, because just as war is too important to be left to the generals, our Constitution is too important to be left to law professors. While Wexler is to be commended for his efforts to bring light into our founding document’s dark corners and make those crevasses accessible to the average reader, “Odd Clauses’’ is just too meandering.

Wexler’s introduction compares the Constitution to a zoo. The well-known portions are likened to lions and giraffes, and the clauses he addresses are the more obscure wombats and bat-eared foxes. But instead of a zoo, the book constitutes a disorganized menagerie, arranged not for the ease of the reader but based on the curious whims of the author. Traditional zoology has a clear and precise classification system that makes evident precisely at which points wombats differ from walruses and horses from hippopotami and precisely why they diverged. It is a shame that Wexler’s “constitutional zoology’’ simply invites us to look at the pretty animals instead.

Try BostonGlobe.com today and get two weeks FREE. Ben Jacobs is a frequent contributor to The Boston Globe editorial page and can be reached at JacobsBenC@gmail.com.