James I's declaration to the Parliament of 1621 was quickly followed on March 31, 1621, by a proclamation abolishing “bills of conformity”—a remedy for insolvent debtors in the English courts of equity. MPs had raised conformity as a grievance early in the session, and debate was one-sided. James's admission, and the proclamation suppressing conformity that followed, explained that debtors exhibited the bills for “no other end or purpose, but to defeat or delay their just and honest Creditors.” Conformity was “so great an evill” that it had encouraged “wilfull Bankerupts,” caused a scarcity of money, and triggered a trade depression. A statute passed in the Parliament of 1624 closed the remaining loopholes and abolished conformity.

At 10:00 AM on September 24, 1943, James F. Lincoln, the sixty-year-old president and owner of the Lincoln Electric Company of Cleveland, Ohio, entered a meeting with U.S. Navy officials who wanted to discuss his company's recent earnings. A former Ohio State University football team captain and active supporter of the Republican Party, the outspoken Lincoln had already made it clear that he objected to the whole proceeding. One of the nation's leading suppliers of welding equipment, Lincoln's company had seen its sales boom since the beginning of World War II, as shipbuilders, aircraft producers, and other prime contractors demanded more welding machines and electrodes. Now, after a year of correspondence and preparations, the U.S. Navy had asked Lincoln to come to Washington to discuss how much of the company's 1942 profits were fair, and how much should be returned to the United States.

For a man who studied, but never practiced law, laws and lawgiving played a central role in the life of James Madison. In a public career spanning forty years, in which he served in the Virginia General Assembly, the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, the United States Congress, as secretary of state, and as president, Madison could be found at the center of events, at one time or another, either establishing, expounding, discussing, interpreting, or executing state or federal law. Even in his long retirement, he had important things to say about constitutional interpretation. In all this activity, vital to the creation and continued well-being of the early Republic, did Madison's status as a law student, but not a lawyer, matter much in his search for solutions to the persistent problems of republican self-governance?

We think of James Madison as a political theorist, legislative drafter, and constitutional interpreter. Recent scholarship has fought fiercely over the nature of his political thought. Unlike other important early national leaders—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Edmund Randolph, James Wilson—law has been seen as largely irrelevant to Madison's intellectual biography. Madison, however, studied law and, at least in one extant manuscript, took careful notes. These notes have been missing for over a century, and their loss contributed to the sense that Madison must not have been that interested in law. Now located, these notes reveal Madison's significant grasp of law and his striking curiosity about the problem of language. Madison's interest in interpretation is certainly not news to scholars. These notes, however, help to establish that this interest predated the Constitution and that his interest in constitutional interpretation was an application of a larger interest in language. Moreover, Madison thought about the problem of legal interpretation as a student of law, never from the secure status of lawyer. Over his lifetime, he advocated a variety of institutional approaches to constitutional interpretation, and this comfort with nonjudicial interpreters, along with a peculiar ambivalence about the proper location of constitutional interpretation, may owe a great deal to his self-perception as a law student but never a lawyer.

The Philadelphia convention of 1787 looms enormous in many accounts of U.S. constitutional history, serving as the set piece in which various and muddled worldviews, theories, interests, and allegiances gelled into a coherent science and structure of politics. The Convention thus becomes time zero in the chronology of U.S. political and constitutional development, a finite and forward-looking first moment defining, for good or ill, the terms according which subsequent debates regarding the nature of U S. government would be conducted.

In 1789 James Madison and Thomas Jefferson engaged in one of their many exchanges on constitutionalism. As with other Jeffersonian flights of philosophy, the younger Madison had to rein in the excesses of his senior partner and collaborator. The issue at hand was Jefferson's famous opinion “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” So confident was Jefferson in the truth of this idea that he called it “self-evident.” Their exchange has received insightful and comprehensive analysis, which needs no revisiting here. Adrienne Koch, whose treatment of this “intellectual reciprocity” is among our most careful, sees it as revealing the essence of the two men, pitting the “more speculative and more daring” Jefferson against “the more astute politician” Madison.

James Madison was a “law student or demi-lawyer,” Mary Sarah Bilder writes, with misgivings about his own role in the lawyers' world that he helped bring into being under the new federal Constitution. If Madison was the Constitution's “father,” his offspring seemed somewhat misbegotten. Structurally and ideologically the new regime was “federalist,” Alison LaCroix explains, with courts and lawyers “mediating among multiple levels of government” that retained a significant degree of separation and autonomy. But this was just what Madison had hoped to avoid. The demi-lawyer instead pushed hard for a “republican remedy” for the Confederation's pathologies, a structural solution to the centrifugal tendencies that jeopardized union and republican government. His proposed federal veto and council of revision would have constituted a “republican prerogative, via Congress” to check recalcitrant state legislatures. In effect, LaCroix concludes, Madison “envisioned the legislatures”—state and federal—“operating almost as a single system—a compound legislature comprising inferior and superior bodies.” Convinced by deep study and hard experience that federations must fail, the Madison who promoted the Virginia Plan was an ultranationalist, or anti-federalist.