James Wilson's Law Lectures
ion. 64 January JAMES WILSON'S LAW LECTURES jurisprudence. In them, he addressed perennial questions of morality, epistemology, and, to a lesser extent, metaphysics. In doing so he borrowed from and critically evaluated philosophical giants such as Rene Descartes, Richard Hooker, John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Thomas Reid. As well, he spent significant time discussing political theory, notably issues involving the origin, nature, and purpose of government, political obligation, and the dangers of concentrated power. Finally, he addressed the nature of law, the nature of international law (where he attempted to mediate between Samuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius), and the proper relation between natural and positive law. For his second course of lectures, which consists of the remaining twenty-two chapters in the printed editions, Wilson turned to a careful examination of the United States and Pennsylvania constitutions. Because he played a significant role in authoring these documents, his understanding of them is particularly interesting. As well, his substantial discussion of natural and positive rights sheds important light on the founders' view of rights. Toward the end of the lectures, Wilson began to introduce his students to the "retail business of law." These chapters tend to be less substantial and more practical than the earlier lectures, but they still often yield significant insight regarding, for instance, the role ofjuries in determining fact and law, the difference between law and equity, and the role of attorneys in the new republic. 5 Wilson planned to publish his lectures, which he thought would help secure his reputation as America's Blackstone. However, his duties on the Supreme Court, as well as his worsening financial condition, prevented him from doing so. Six years after his father's death in 1798, Bird Wilson, relying on his father's notebooks, published the first edition of the lectures. In the preface to this work, he claimed not to have altered "the language of the Author," although he confessed to having divided them into "parts and chapters, according to the subjects." 6 Subsequent editions of the lectures edited by James De Witt Andrews (1896) and Robert G. McCloskey (1967) relied completely on Bird's edition. Wilson's lectures have helped historians, political scientists, and academic lawyers to understand the founding era better.7 Given their signif5 Page Smith provides a good overview of the lectures in his biography of WilsonJames Wilson: Founding Father, 1742-1798 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1956), 308-42. I discuss them in detail in Mark Hall, The Political and Legal Philosophy ofJames Wilson, 1742-1798 (Columbia, MO, 1997). 6 Works, 64. 7 In my book on Wilson I discuss numerous works that use the law lectures to shed light on the 2004