“St. George Tucker and the Invention of the Written Constitution,” December 5 Colloquium with KICD Distinguished Visiting Research Professor Max M. Edling

Reviving a fall tradition from years past, King’s College London Professor Max Edling, in Columbia during 2025-26 as the Kinder Institute’s Distinguished Visiting Research Professor, will end the semester with a presentation of his research, traveling back to founding era Williamsburg to examine William & Mary Professor St. George Tucker’s central role in championing the now-contested claim that the idea of a written constitution was the United States’ most vital contribution to political modernity. The talk will be held on December 5 at 3:30pm in Jesse 410, and this post will be updated with live stream links as they become available.

Abstract

The American Revolution ushered in a remarkable era of political transformation on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that gave birth to the modern world. It is often said that the idea of a constitution as a written document was one of the most important American contributions to political modernity. Decades of critical investigation into the constitutional history of the founding era has cast doubt on this claim, however. Scholars now question if written constitutions were either new or important. Nevertheless, the historical record makes abundantly clear that contemporaries believed that these documents were both novel and an important political innovation. What are we to make of this discrepancy?

This lecture uses the writings of St. George Tucker to investigate the concept of the written constitution in the founding era. As Professor of Law and Police at the College of William and Mary, Tucker was tasked with educating lawyers for a new nation. Like other law teachers in the immediate post-independence period, Tucker had to fully and systematically explain how republican America differed from monarchical Britain. The origin, function, and meaning of written constitutions in the American system of government, at both the state and federal level, featured prominently in this discussion.

Max M. Edling is Professor of Early American History at King’s College London. An expert on the creation of the US Constitution and the development of the early American state, he is the author of three books, most recently Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution.