09.28.2026
As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation. Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, and fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the president and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, he was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors. Instead of being remembered as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.
About the Speakers
Jesse Wegman is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he works with the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Future of the Constitution Advisory Committee. From 2013 through 2025, Wegman was a member of the New York Times editorial board, writing more than 1,000 editorials and signed pieces on law and politics, the Supreme Court, democracy, and the rule of law. His work was part of a package that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2018. Wegman is the author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (St. Martin’s Press, 2020) and The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026), the first full-length biography in more than 70 years of the most democratic of all the American founders.
Danielle Allen is a political philosopher at Harvard University, where she is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and directs the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her many books on democracy and American political life include Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Justice by Means of Democracy, and, most recently, Radical Duke, the story of Charles Lennox, an eighteenth-century aristocrat turned democratic reformer. A leading voice in the movement to renovate American democracy, she chairs the board of FairVote and is the convening chair for the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, which is leading a November 2026 ballot initiative for all-party primaries here in Massachusetts.