Lawyers at the Convention: ​Profiles of the Great Figures of Law and Philosophy of Law Who Became the Architects of America. Six volumes. 150 to 190 pages. ea.
From the editors of Old Masters International

                                Description and Sample Table of Contents:

            "The enduring honor of the profession they so eminently graced…”
  
In this splendid six-volume series, the greatest legal minds of the Constitutional Convention are presented together as in no other such work of its type or subject matter.  This series looks at the extraordinary accomplishment of a group of lawyers who were also philosophers and visionaries and changed the course of world history.  Not only did they go on to eminent careers following the ratification of the Constitution, but their ideas, so brilliantly argued, formed the basis of what we understand as the fundamental precepts of modern democratic institutions.  It is no exaggeration to state that they constitute as a group the most important group of thinkers in the history of the United States. 

This is an original and intricate editorial project carefully curated to present the best scholarship and the best select writings of each profiled lawyer-founder.  Each profile consists of three literary categories: first, the best scholarly minds of yester-decade and century whose analyses we judge to be most eloquent and profound; second, the select writings and speeches of each founder within and outside of the context of the Constitutional Convention. These are in addition to the select writings and correspondence from each featured lawyer-founder.  With exquisite art work throughout—both classical Old Masters portraits and never-before published illustrative portraiture—this series is printed fine Fabriano paper, designed and sewn in Milan.

        Among the main points about this series made in the Introductory essays of each volume:

• ~The Constitutional Convention included among its fifty-five sitting members, thirty-two or thirty-three lawyers, some of whom were judges of State Courts and many of whom later rose to places of high administrative or judicial distinction under the newly created government. Then, too, of fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, twenty six were lawyers.  And when in 1913 scholar Max Farrand published The Framers of the Constitution, he famously ranked the top four Founders, naming, in order, James Madison, James Wilson, George Washington and Gouverneur Morris; when Clinton Rossiter made his list fifty-three years later, the ranking did not change. Remarkably, three of the four ranked were lawyers. Just what was it about the study of law and profession of lawyer that made these men such exceptional thinkers, whose legal reasoning changed the course of world history?


• ~To list the lawyers of the Convention would be, with few exceptions, to name the most illustrious figures in it. As outlined in the series volumes, among these men one finds the preeminent examples of Madison, who became President of the United States and Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury.  But there are also Wilson, Rutledge, Ellsworth, Blair and Paterson who went to the Supreme Court, with Rutledge and Ellsworth being respectively appointed the second and third Chief Justices. There are Roger Sherman, the man who, a lawyer without formal legal education, signed all four founding documents; Abraham Baldwin, and  Rufus King, who became United States senators, and King twice ‘Minister’ (ambassador) to England. There is Gouverneur Morris, Minister to France and a U. S Senator; Randolph, an Attorney General; Charles Pinckney, a U.S. Senator and Minister to Spain; Richard Bassett, also a U.S. Senator, Governor of Delaware and a United States Circuit Judge; Caleb Strong, who was ten times Governor of Massachusetts; Dr. Johnson, a U.S. Senator and President of Columbia College, while Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was offered a place on the Supreme Court bench, and the positions of Secretary of War and Secretary of State, but declined all three.


• ~James Wilson was called “second to James Madison”, was credited with being the principal architect of the Executive Branch and rivaled Gouverneur Morris in his capacity for influential eloquence, while Jefferson himself borrowed from his writings; George Wythe was Chancellor of Virginia and a famous preceptor of law, who numbered among his students Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Monroe and Henry Clay; Luther Martin, was then leader of the American bar, later defended Aaron Burr when tried for treason; William Livingston was several times governor of New Jersey, while David Brearley was Chief Justice of that State and for eleven years head of its Supreme Court; James Wilson led the Philadelphia bar; while Gunning Bedford, Jr., so distinguished for his eloquence, was Attorney General of Delaware and the first judge of the United States District court for that district.  John Dickinson was the reputed author of the Articles of Confederation, while George Read had been Attorney General of Delaware and became a U.S. Senator and Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court.  It is an extraordinary group of men.


• ~Of the most important committees of the Convention, lawyers predominated in their membership. The Committee of Detail, which prepared the draft of the Constitution after its basic principles had been exhaustively discussed, was composed of Rutledge, Randolph, Gorham, Ellsworth and Wilson and all but Gorham were lawyers. The Committee of Style, appointed to phrase and arrange the Constitution, consisted of Johnson, Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Madison and King were all lawyers; “while to Gouverneur Morris we probably owe that wonderful lucidity of expression and condensation of statement which have made the Constitution a master piece of literary style”, in the words of the Journal of the American Bar Association in 1927.


• ~The so-called "Virginia Plan," which formed the nucleus of the Constitution, was probably largely drafted by Madison. It was sponsored in the Convention by Randolph, as was the "New Jersey Plan" by Paterson and the "Pinckney Plan/' by Charles Pinckney. As we have seen, all of these were lawyers.


• But perhaps the crowning glory of all the work of 1787 was the judicial structure of the Federal Government. It occasioned comparatively little disagreement in the Constitutional Convention, but it stands as a towering monument to the ability and the foresight of the delegates. To Wilson, Rutledge, Ellsworth and Randolph it is mainly due “and had lawyers had no other share in the proceedings of the Convention, their work alone in this respect would entitle them to the enduring honor of the professional they so eminently graced.” 

The Series:

Volume One:   Roger Sherman ~Spencer Roane ~ Oliver Ellsworth ~ James Wilson

Volume Two:  Gouverneur Morris ~ Rufus King ~ Willam Patterson ~Edmund Randolph ~
    John Lansing

Volume Three:  George Wythe ~ John Rutledge ~ William Churchill Houston ~ George Read ~
Robert Yates

Volume Four:  John Dickinson ~ William Samuel Johnson ~ Gunning Bedford ~ William Few ~
Charles Pickney

Volume Five:   Luther Martin ~ David Brearly ~ Caleb Strong ~ Abraham Baldwin ~ William Livingston

Volume Six:  Alexander Hamilton ~ Richard Bassett ~ James Madison ~ William Davie ~ John Blair 

Below:  Chapter Pages from Volume One

(continued from previous column) We have wandered so far awav--and in more ways than one from those ideals of the Founders, that, whenever we turn back to them, seem to be forever not without an effect of warning and reproach.  The desire to celebrate the founders is too often a matter of partisanship or merely an academic reference, or the interest of antiquarians and collectors.  Then, too, contemporary journalism has set about rewriting these histories and biographies to suit the ideologies and biases of our times, with no respect to tradition, to objective scholarship, to even historical context and in the process too much of our natural reverence for this country’s greatest historical characters has dissipated.  It is our hope you will find ample treasure in this series of the mostly unsung heroes of the Convention and the founding of this country, each of whom was a triumphant example of the stateliness and power of the legal profession and its immeasurable influence upon the history of this country.

Our books feature original artwork by a Milan-based artist who has enjoyed over a dozen international and Milan-based solo exhibitions over the past twenty years, and has been featured in national newspapers.

The Art of the Art of War

In the fifteenth century a few men began to scrutinize nature, very tentatively at first, and with no premonition of the results which such scrutiny would reach. Foremost among them was Leonardo da Vinci. Other investigators of that century, Copernicus the most conspicuous, have ranked higher than he in the annals of science ; but none, as I hope to show, equaled him in scientific endowment. He was disenthralled from mediaeval preconceptions, for he possessed a temperament so purged of theories that in approaching a new fact his sole aim was to discover the true nature of that fact, unbiassed by what others had found in it. His curiosity was insatiable ; his methods were observation and experiment ; his advance was from the known to the unknown, whereas the mediaeval, as we have seen, took the unknown for granted, and ceased to inquire. That Leonardo's achievements in science and invention should never have had due recognition, is to be attributed in part to their great range?the world remembers longer him who travels farthest in a single direction, than him who travels,far in many; and in part to an accident which buried them for three centuries.  In this superb series of five volumes, the science, art and technological advances of five of the greatest artists in world history are brought to life in stunning volumes of rare and unusual drawings depicting their unknown works.  A visual delight and utterly fascinating chapter of cultural history.  

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