New Ratification Documents Now Available
Rob Natelson

I've written six short postings, available at the Independence Institute website, summarizing the implications for constitutional meaning of documents in the three newly published volumes of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution.   Scholars may find them useful as a sort of guide to the "What's New" in those volumes. 

 

The new volumes print material from the Pennsylvania ratification debates that the Documentary History series formerly made available only on microfiche. That microfiche was unindexed and very hard to read. The new volumes make the material readily accessible.

 

Some of the new material is important enough that perhaps it should have been in the initial printed version—for example, four essays on the Constitution's meaning written by Tench Coxe.

 

There are no substantive surprises in any of this material, and much of it buttresses conclusions already reached by objective and careful originalist scholars. (You know who you are!) I'm gratified to report that there is ample corroboration of conclusions reached in my series of articles on the original meaning of discrete constitutional clauses.

 

Anyway, these six posts summarize the most important content of the three volumes. In preparing them I did not merely check the volume indices. Rather, I spent many hours leafing through every page of all three volumes. Perhaps that will relieve others from having to do the same.

 

The descriptions and URLs are below.