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Welcome to the Quill Project home page. Here you can find more information about the project, what can be achieved on the platform and the team behind it.
We work to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world's foundational legal texts.
A negotiated text is the product of a formal decision-making process where a text has been negotiated and drafted over a period of time.
Think of the process as made up of four elements — people, procedures, documents, and decisions.
If it is your first time here and you would like to know more about the project, please check out the introduction video below:
The constitutional order of the United States faces exceptional challenges. Many surveys document the poor public understanding of America's system of government and basic constitutional rights. Globally, faith in American-style democracy has fallen to unprecedented lows, and even within the United States itself satisfaction with America's system of government has dropped to below 50%.
The Quill project has revolutionized understanding of the development of the American federal government through open-access digital publications and educational materials related to the drafting of the Federal Constitution (1787), the Bill of Rights (1789), and the Reconstruction Amendments (1864-70). The significance of these landmark moments in American history is well recognized, and this work has been widely welcomed by scholars, lawyers, and educators.
The creation of federal landmarks, such as the 1787 Constitution and the Bill of Rights, tells only a small part of the story of US constitutional development. Over 235 de novo constitutions have been created in state constitutional conventions since 1776, and most have been amended dozens or even hundreds of times. This number does not include the many constitutional conventions held by native peoples and that also form an important part of US constitutional history.
Despite their continued importance in governing the day-to-day lives of US citizens, including recent calls from the Supreme Court to pay greater attention to these texts, State constitutional conventions have received scant academic attention, in part because of the neglected and scattered state of the relevant archives and in part because of the previous difficulty of making the records of such processes easily intelligible even if collated and edited.
