It is not possible to argue that the framers wisely created the electoral college and provided a sound basis for selecting the president in the twenty-first century. The electoral college does not work at all as the framers anticipated. Electors rarely exercise discretion and are condemned when they do. Instead, they are agents of political parties, which did not exist in 1787. The House has not selected the president since 1824. In addition, most of the motivations behind the creation of the electoral college are simply irrelevant today. Legislative election is not an option, there is little danger that the president will be too powerful if directly elected, voters have extraordinary access to information on the candidates, there is no justification at all for either electors or state legislatures to exercise discretion in selecting the president, defending the interests of slavery is unthinkable, and the short-term pressures have long dissipated. Those delegates who wanted electors to exercise independent judgment or be selected by state legislatures would soon be disappointed, and there is no support—and no justification—today for either option. In addition, the broad thrust of constitutional revision over the past two centuries has been in the direction of democratization and majority rule.

Prevailing scholarly interpretations cast James Wilson's Lectures on Law (1790–1791) at the College of Philadelphia as paradigmatic of the founding era’s allegedly rationalist, heterodox natural theology. Yet Wilson’s Lectures point in quite the opposite direction: to a vision of the founding era jurisprudence that was self-consciously rooted in a divinely created and rationally intelligible moral order that was both complemented and presupposed by Christian revelation. So understood, Wilson’s Lectures bring into focus the limitations of the common scholarly conventions and categories that contrast enlightenment and religion, reason and revelation, or Nature’s God and the God of Abraham. In Wilson’s Lectures, these are not “either/or” categories but are rather presented together in a synthesis that emerged from the long Christian engagement with the natural-law tradition.

James Wilson, born in Scotland and educated during the Scottish Enlightenment, became one of the most influential jurists and statesmen of the American founding era. He signed the Declaration of Independence, served as an influential delegate to the Constitutional Convention, became one of the first justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and was the first law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As a framer, jurist and educator, he consistently argued for recognizing the sovereignty of the people themselves, which he believed was a central component of a God-given natural law. Many of Wilson’s views that were innovative or controversial at the time – such as the concepts of popular sovereignty, one person-one vote, and the power of the Supreme Court to strike down unconstitutional laws – have become important elements of modern American government.