In commemoration of Constitution Day, the Claremont Institute has just published an essay by Professor David Forte.  In his essay, titled “Noble Sinners,” Professor Forte highlights the role that our Constitution played in holding the country together in its early fractious years.  He explains how the drafters of the Constitution steadily evolved into bitter political rivals in the years following the country’s founding.  Within a dozen years, “[t]he founding’s great lights had become openly contemptuous of one another.  Political differences seemed impossible to bridge.”

Professor Forte argues that the country was able to survive these deep personal and political divisions among its leaders because the Constitution they had written “had already become an object of reverence,” serving as a “a fundamental charter that binds the people against themselves.”

The essay is based on a lecture Professor Forte delivered last year at Cleveland-Marshall, in the law school’s Constitution Day commemoration.