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Mary College in Virginia. Later, as American law developed under the
new State and Federal constitutions, American lawyers began writing legal treatises and publishing their own reports of cases, so that American
law, though English in origin, became increasingly distinguishable from
its parent system.
The most prolific and influential of the early legal writers was Joseph
Story, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1811 to 1845. Story,
who also lectured at the Harvard Law School for many years and was
widely acclaimed as America’s foremost legal scholar, published nine major legal treatises while serving on the Court. The most famous of these
was his three-volume classic, Commentaries on the Constitution, which
was first published in 1833 but went through many subsequent editions. Included in the work was a complete analysis, based on The Federalist essays, of the origin, meaning, and purpose of every clause of the
Constitution. This in itself was enormously helpful to judges and lawyers, who had little to go on except The Federalist and only limited access
to the original founding documents that might be of assistance in determining the intent of particular provisions of the Constitution. James
Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 were not
published until 1840. Jonathan Elliot did not publish his four-volume collection of Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution until 1830. In fact, debates in many State ratifying conventions were either fragmentary or nonexistent. Story’s Commentaries,
plus The Federalist and a few shorter and less comprehensive works, thus
served as the principal guides for interpreting the Constitution in the
founding era.
What was especially valuable to members of the bench and bar in
Story’s Commentaries, however, was the incorporation into the text of material on constitutional interpretation. Devoting a large portion of his
treatise to ‘‘Rules of Interpretation,’’ Justice Story endeavored to explain,
step-by-step, the process to be followed for the proper interpretation of
the Constitution. This is the first and only time a member of the Supreme
Court has ever attempted to expound at length on the principles and mechanics of construing the American Constitution. It was an innovative
and timely addition to the existing literature. When we stop to consider
the influence of Story and his Commentaries on constitutional develop-