Introduction

The editors of the Utah Law Review have selected an appropriate theme for this edition. Two hundred years ago, on September 17, 1787, after a hot, humid summer of debate-which also became warm at times-and compromise, the delegates emerged from the East Room of the Pennsylvania State House from their final meeting. Seventy-two delegates had been picked by twelve states, but only fifty-five attended. A good many members of the Confederation Congress had apprehensions about the whole idea and they succeeded in placing language in the invitation stating that the meeting was for the "sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation." The Confederation was a loose alliance that had barely held the states together during the war for independence, and it was showing signs of disintegration by 1786.

The fifty-five delegates, however, did not merely revise the Articles; instead they produced a wholly new document that became the Constitution of the United States-a unique plan that would bind the states as a true nation in a federal republic.