Roger Sherman, treasurer of Yale 1765–1776, was the only person to sign all four major documents establishing the United States and its governance structure: the Declaration, the earlier Articles of Association, the Articles of Confederation of 1777, and the Constitution.
Sherman was not, however, the last Yalie to pore over the principles and particulars of the Constitution. The document has been dissected and debated by undergraduate and graduate students in classrooms across campus for more than two centuries.
Speaking at the Yale Law School on Constitution Day 2014, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said:
“Why are we celebrating [Constitution Day] today? What does it basically mean? It means that for 200 years or more, people in the United States — originally 4 million, today 310 million — have, with all kinds of ups and downs, learned to live together under the rule of law, and come into the courts … and their basic differences are often — not always — resolved with this document and other statutes, not in the streets with fists, guns, and knives.” (Read the story about his talk or watch the video.)
Here are some ways to celebrate the U.S. Constitution at Yale.
Read the Constitution online.
From the preamble to the 27th amendment, the entire text of the U.S. Constitution is available online through Yale’s Avalon Project.
Watch "Rare Books: The Constitution."
This video, created in conjunction with Professor Akhil Amar’s “Constitutional Law” class on Coursera, looks at the Constitution-related documents in the Law Library.
Listen to a lecture about the Constitutional Convention.
In a session from her Yale Open Course on “The American Revolution,” Professor Joanne Freeman discusses the debate over the Constitution at the Federal Convention of 1787 — a convention that, she notes, by no means had an inevitable outcome.
Source: Yale
