Over at
JOTWELL,
James E. Pfander (Northwestern University) is urging readers to check out "
The Committee of Detail," a recent article by
William Ewald (University of Pennsylvania). The article appeared in Volume 28, no. 2, of
Constitutional Commentary (2012). Here are the first two paragraphs of Pfander's review:
We know far too little about James Wilson, the Scottish-born and
-educated lawyer who played a central role in framing the Constitution
as a delegate from Pennsylvania and later served as Associate Justice of
the Supreme Court. Wilson was hounded to an early grave in 1798, after
financial reversals landed him in debtor’s prison. That ignominious
end seems to have cast a long shadow, obscuring his earlier career as
lawyer, judge, and statesman. Happily, however, William Ewald has
embarked on an intellectual biography of Wilson that will doubtless do
much to restore the reputation of this most nationalist of founding
fathers.
One interesting chapter of that biography has just appeared in
article form. It focuses, as the title suggests, on the work of the
Pennsylvania Convention’s Committee of Detail. Wilson was one of five
members of that Committee, named in July 1787 to prepare a draft
Constitution that reflected the Convention’s deliberations to that
point. Much of what we know about the Committee’s work comes from the
text of Wilson’s own drafts of the Constitution. We can watch
provisions evolve and take shape as the product of a deliberative
process of which we have no other record.
Read on
here. The Ewald article is available
here.
