james madison essay prompt

James Madison University | JMU

• Cost & scholarships
• Essay prompt

Want to see your chances of admission at James Madison University | JMU?

We take every aspect of your personal profile into consideration when calculating your admissions chances.

James Madison University | JMU’s 2023-24 Essay Prompts

Common app personal essay.

The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the prompt to inspire and structure your response. Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal. Use the full range if you need it, but don‘t feel obligated to do so.

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you‘ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

What will first-time readers think of your college essay?

James Madison and the Bill of Rights

Written by: Bill of Rights Institute

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain the differing ideological positions on the structure and function of the federal government

Suggested Sequencing

This Narrative should be assigned to students at the beginning of their study of Chapter 4. This reading can be used in conjunction with the Actions of the First Congress Lesson or following the Lesson to reinforce main ideas.

In early 1787, when Virginia Congressman James Madison was preparing for the Constitutional Convention, he wrote an essay entitled “Vices of the Political System,” detailing the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. One of the main problems with the Articles, in Madison’s view, was that tyrannical majorities in the states passed unjust laws violating the rights of numerical minorities. He had seen the oppression of religious dissenters in Virginia and became the leading advocate for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. But injustice was occurring in all the states. As a result, Madison drafted the Virginia Plan, which greatly strengthened the power of the central government and laid the groundwork for the debates at the Constitutional Convention.

James Madison as portrayed by Gilbert Stuart in about 1805-1807. Madison was a dominant force at the Constitutional Convention and took notes that have served as an indispensable source for historians, who call him the “Father of the Constitution.”

At the Constitutional Convention, Madison advocated for constitutional principles of separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism , and federalism, which would limit government and protect individual liberties. However, he lost one central feature of his plan of government – a national veto over state laws, meant to prevent majority tyranny in the states.

On September 12, 1787, during the last days of the Constitutional Convention, fellow Virginia delegate George Mason rose and proposed a bill of rights, a list of rights belonging to the people that government could not violate. The delegates were wrapping up their business and worried that a prolonged debate on a bill of rights could endanger the success of their project. Roger Sherman of Connecticut also reassured the convention that the states had their own bills of rights and so had no need for a national bill of rights. The convention unanimously rejected Mason’s idea.

When the Constitution was sent to the state conventions for ratification, the Anti-Federalists who were opposed to it agreed on the need for a bill of rights to protect the liberties of the people. Several Federalists, or those who supported the new Constitution, disagreed. On October 6, Pennsylvanian James Wilson delivered a speech at the state house in which he argued that a bill of rights was unnecessary because the new national government had limited, enumerated (i.e., specified) powers and had no power to violate liberties in the first place. In Federalist Paper No. 84, Alexander Hamilton warned that a bill of rights could even be dangerous, because defining certain rights vaguely would leave them subject to misinterpretation or violation, where previously no such power had existed. Moreover, some important rights would be left out and therefore endangered. Most importantly, Hamilton argued that “the constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS” because of the principle of limited government.

During the ratification debate, Federalists in many states had to make compromises. Although they were able to prevent the addition of “conditional amendments” prior to ratification, they had to promise to pass a bill of rights after the Constitution had been ratified. Madison opposed even this and thought “the amendments are a blemish.”

Madison conducted an extensive correspondence over several months with his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was in Paris at the time. Jefferson lamented the absence of a bill of rights in the Constitution and asserted, “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.” Madison waffled on the issue. He did not believe the “omission a material defect.” In a republican form of government rooted upon popular sovereignty, the majority could act tyrannically by violating the rights of the minority. Among his several reasons for opposing a bill of rights was that such documents were often just “parchment barriers” that overbearing majorities violated in the states regardless of whether the written protections for minority rights existed. As he wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison also believed that a large republic would have many contending factions that would prevent a majority from violating the rights of minorities. Nevertheless, he began to change his mind.

Madison was deeply concerned about the continuing strength of the Anti-Federalists after ratification. Anti-Federalists were still calling for structural changes and a second constitutional convention to limit the powers of the national government and deny it power over taxation and the regulation of commerce. Madison feared this would lead to chaos and fought against it. He also sought greater consensus and harmony around constitutional principles by reaching out to the opponents of the new government. He ran in a hard-fought campaign against James Monroe for a seat in the House of Representatives and made a campaign promise to support a bill of rights, particularly an amendment protecting the liberty of conscience. Finally, Madison wrote President George Washington’s Inaugural Address, which indicated support for a bill of rights to be acted upon in the First Congress.

Representative Madison became the champion for a bill of rights in the First Congress, but the idea met a hostile reception. Most representatives and senators thought Congress had more important work to do setting up the new government or passing tax bills for revenue. Many thought the bill of rights was a “tub to the whale” or a distraction, like the empty tub sailors would use to draw away a whale’s attention. Madison was undeterred and dedicated himself to the cause of protecting the people’s liberties.

On June 8, 1789, dressed in black as always, Madison rose on the floor of the House to deliver a speech in favor of a bill of rights. His arguments were founded on the goal of a harmonious political order and the ideals of justice. A bill of rights would extinguish the apprehensions of Anti-Federalists and convince them of the “principles of amity and moderation” held by the other side, now prepared to fulfill a sacred promise made during the ratification debate. Rhode Island and North Carolina, which had withheld their ratification of the Constitution until a bill of rights was added, would also be welcomed into the union. Most importantly, the Bill of Rights would “expressly declare the great rights of mankind secured under this constitution.”

The first U.S. Congress met in Federal Hall in New York City for one year before moving to Philadelphia in 1790.

Madison then skillfully guided the amendments through the Congress. He and his committee reconciled all the amendments proposed by the state ratifying conventions and discarded any that would alter the structure of the Constitution or the new government. Limiting himself to those protecting essential liberties, Madison developed a list of nineteen amendments and a preamble. He wanted them to be woven into the text of the Constitution, not simply affixed to the end of the document as amendments, and he sought a key amendment to protect from violation by state governments religious freedom, a free press, and trial by jury. He lost both these provisions but prudentially and moderately continued to support the Bill of Rights he had proposed.

On August 24, the House sent seventeen amendments to the Senate after approving them by more than the required two-thirds margin. By September 14, two-thirds of the Senate had approved twelve amendments, removing the limitations on state governments. President Washington sent the amendments to the states, endorsing them even though the president did not have a formal role in their adoption.

Over the next two years, eleven states ratified the Bill of Rights to meet the three-fourths constitutional threshold, including North Carolina and Rhode Island. Virginia became the last state to ratify on December 15, 1791. The Bill of Rights fulfilled Madison’s goals of reconciling its opponents to the Constitution and protecting individual liberties. However, in Barron v. Baltimore (1833), Chief Justice John Marshall affirmed that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. The Fourteenth Amendment and later Supreme Court cases in the twentieth century reversed this decision and applied the Bill of Rights to the states through the principle known as “incorporation.”

Review Questions

1. Which delegate to the Constitutional Convention first proposed a bill of rights?

• Thomas Jefferson
• James Madison
• George Mason
• James Monroe

2. One of James Madison’s constitutional principles was rejected. This principle would have given

• the Federal government a veto over state legislation
• the Executive Branch more authority than the other two branches of government
• more authority to the governor of each state
• explicit rights to the people

3. After the submission of the Constitution to the states for ratification, James Madison’s greatest concern grew from

• his fear of the growing divide between the North and South
• the endless debate over the need for a bill of rights
• the strength of resistance to the Constitution expressed by the Anti-Federalists
• the passage of tax bills that would disproportionately harm the small states

4. Which individual helped changed James Madison’s opposition to a bill of rights?

• George Washington

5. Alexander Hamilton’s major argument against a bill of rights was that

• a specific list of rights could be misinterpreted and violated
• it was too burdensome for the federal government to enforce
• it would be abused and interpreted differently by the different states
• the rights would be redundant because states already had their own bills of rights

6. One major reason James Madison initially believed a bill of rights was unnecessary was that

• the United States would be broken into many factions and the majority could not violate the rights of the minority
• individual rights were implied in the body of the Constitution
• a bill of rights would give the people too much authority

7. Which of the following was not a reason that the delegates at the Constitutional Convention omitted adding a bill of rights to the original document?

• Many delegates believed a bill of rights would be unnecessary because all the states had their own.
• There was a strong belief that individual rights were implied in the document they had already created.
• A debate over adding a bill of rights would have prolonged the Convention and could have endangered the work they were about to complete.
• A bill of rights would have been next to impossible to enforce in a nation as large as the United States.

Free Response Questions

• Explain James Madison’s evolving support for the Bill of Rights.
• Describe the debate over the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.

AP Practice Questions

“IN THE course of the foregoing review of the Constitution, I have taken notice of, and endeavored to answer most of the objections which have appeared against it. There, however, remain a few which either did not fall naturally under any particular head or were forgotten in their proper places. . . . The most considerable of the remaining objections is that the plan of the convention contains no bill of rights. Among other answers given to this, it has been upon different occasions remarked that the constitutions of several of the States are in a similar predicament. I add that New York is of the number. And yet the opposers of the new system, in this State, who profess an unlimited admiration for its constitution, are among the most intemperate partisans of a bill of rights. To justify their zeal in this matter, they allege two things: one is that, though the constitution of New York has no bill of rights prefixed to it, yet it contains, in the body of it, various provisions in favor of particular privileges and rights, which, in substance amount to the same thing; the other is, that the Constitution adopts, in their full extent, the common and statute law of Great Britain, by which many other rights, not expressed in it, are equally secured. To the first I answer, that the Constitution proposed by the convention contains, as well as the constitution of this State, a number of such provisions.”

Publius (Alexander Hamilton), The Federalist Papers: No. 84 , 1788

1. The argument made by Publius in the excerpt

• explains the need for a strong bill of rights in the Constitution
• argues that a bill of rights would be too restrictive
• argues there is no need for a bill of rights because the different states do not agree on what to include
• argues that a bill of rights is implied in the body of the Constitution and is therefore unnecessary

2. Supporters of adding a bill of rights to the Constitution were most likely influenced by

• the violations of the “Rights of Englishmen” at the hands of the British in the years before the American Revolution
• the failure of the government to come to the aid of Massachusetts during Shays’ Rebellion
• fear of the lack of authority in the central government
• the inherent weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation

3. The concepts expressed in the Bill of Rights have most in common with the ideas of

• the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768
• the Olive Branch Petition
• the English Bill of Rights
• the Declaration of Rights and Grievances published by the Stamp Act Congress

Primary Sources

Hamilton, Alexander. Federalist #84 . May 28, 1788. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0247

Madison, James. Letter to Thomas Jefferson. October 17, 1788. https://founders.archives.gov/?q=bill%20of%20rights%20Recipient%3A%22Jefferson%2C%20Thomas%22%20Author%3A%22Madison%2C%20James%22%20Period%3A%22Confederation%20Period%22&s=1511311111&r=27

Madison, James. “Speech in Congress on the Bill of Rights.” June 8, 1789. https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llac&fileName=001/llac001.db&recNum=221

Suggested Resources

Berkin, Carol. The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties . New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.

DeRose, Chris. Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe: The Bill of Rights and the Election That Saved a Nation . Washington, DC: Regnery, 2011.

Goldwin, Robert A. From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constitution . Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1997.

Labunski, Richard. James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Levy, Leonard W. Origins of the Bill of Rights . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Rutland, Robert Allen. The Birth of the Bill of Rights, 1776-1791 . Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

Explore the Constitution

• The Constitution
• Read the Full Text

Dive Deeper

Constitution 101 course.

• The Drafting Table
• Supreme Court Cases Library
• Founders' Library
• Constitutional Rights: Origins & Travels

Start your constitutional learning journey

• News & Debate Overview
• Constitution Daily Blog
• America's Town Hall Programs
• Special Projects

Media Library

America’s Town Hall

Watch videos of recent programs.

• Education Overview

Constitution 101 Curriculum

• Classroom Resources by Topic
• Classroom Resources Library
• Live Online Events
• Professional Learning Opportunities
• Constitution Day Resources

Explore our new 15-unit high school curriculum.

• Explore the Museum
• Plan Your Visit
• Exhibits & Programs
• Field Trips & Group Visits
• Host Your Event
• Buy Tickets

New exhibit

The first amendment, james madison and the judicial power.

By Jack Rakove [1] ,  William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science and (by courtesy) law at Stanford University

Download PDF

Introduction

Asking what James Madison would think about some aspect of modern political life is always a challenging exercise. The problem is not only that no time machine exists to pluck Madison out of his era and plop him down in ours. It is also that Madison was a deeply empirical and creative thinker whose ideas were never frozen into one perfect synthesis, and a political actor whose thoughts reflected his rich experience. If one asks, What would Madison do ?, one has to give Madison the same historical knowledge and political experience that we enjoy, and then let him make up his own mind—an intellectual challenge that lies beyond our own poor powers to add or detract.

A second problem complicates asking how Madison thought about issues relating to the judiciary. Two overarching concerns drove his constitutional thinking in the 1780s. One involved the structure of the federal system and the problem of getting the states to perform their national duties. The other concerned the nature of collective deliberation and legislative decision-making. Madison’s seminal experiences in the 1770s and 1780s were primarily legislative in nature. By contrast, only after 1793 did he turn his critical attention to considering the role of the executive in republican governments. His interest in judicial power also took some time to develop. Many of his most telling comments on this subject were written only after 1819, in response to the key decisions in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Cohens v. Virginia (1821).

Yet Madison was also a close student of Anglo-American law; in Mary Sarah Bilder’s phrase, he was something of a “demi-lawyer.” [2] In his first sustained discussion of American republican governments in 1785, Madison observed that “ The Judiciary Department merits every care. Its efficacy is demonstrated in G. Britain where it maintains private Right against all the corruptions of the two other departments & gives a reputation to the whole Government which it is not in itself entitled to.” [3] At the Federal Convention, he proposed and vigorously supported the idea of giving the judiciary an active role in legislation. Although he worried that judges would never possess the same political advantages as legislators, he believed that the Supreme Court would play a critical role in maintaining the stability of the entire federal system. The brief statement on this point in Federalist 39 remained an orthodoxy to which he still adhered in the 1830s. His criticisms of the Marshall Court notwithstanding, Madison believed that a reliance on the authority of the Supreme Court would offer the South a lasting legal security against northern domination.

Five postulates about Madison as a constitutional thinker

Before examining Madison’s ideas about the judiciary, it would be helpful to list five essential elements of his constitutional thinking.

1. Madison was first and foremost a student of collective political deliberation. His formative political experiences were his three-and-a-half uninterrupted years of service in the Continental Congress (March 1780-October 1783) and the three consecutive terms he then spent representing Orange County in the Virginia House of Delegates (1784-1786). The problem of improving the quality of legislative deliberation and checking the misuse of legislative power dominated his political thinking, at least down to 1793 and again during the two decades of his retirement at Montpelier (1817-1836). His ideas about judicial power were largely derivative of his desire to curb the “impetuous vortex” of legislative activity.

2. Although Madison shared the American revolutionaries’ commitment to the principle of separation of powers, his approach to this subject was never rigid or doctrinaire. As he observed in Federalist 37, “Questions daily occur in the course of practice, which prove the obscurity which reigns in these subjects, and which puzzles the greatest adepts in political science” (a group in which Madison counted himself). Constitutional statements affirming a rigid separation of powers were just that: so many “parchment barriers” that were never self-enforcing. A general adherence to the principle of separated powers did not preclude creative or pragmatic adaptations that would enable the pursuit of the public good and the protection of private rights, Madison’s dual goals of constitutional government.

3. Madison knew that in republican governments, public opinion and popular will were the forces that ultimately drove political decision-making. Those forces were most powerfully expressed in the legislature, and especially in its lower house, the institution that represented the people most directly. To control its dominant political influence and legislative power, expedients might be developed to fortify and unite the weaker institutions, perhaps by linking the presidency with either the Senate or the judiciary. But the best solution of all was the extra-institutional one proposed in Federalist 10 and restated in Federalist 51: to expand the republic to take in a “multiplicity of factions” or interests, so that the formation of the wrong kinds of popular majorities would grow more difficult.

4. It also follows that the most dangerous political forces would coalesce at the state and local levels of government. That was where “factious majorities” could more readily form, and where the plenary authority of state legislatures would leave rights vulnerable to violation. Madison’s initial skepticism about amending the Constitution to include the Bill of Rights presumed that a declaration of rights would do little good unless it applied directly against the states. He also doubted that judges would have the political courage to apply federal constitutional guarantees against the mobilized will of public opinion, again particularly within the states. But he never doubted the moral value of such an ambition, and in principle he would have welcomed the growth of modern rights-based jurisprudence through the “incorporation” against the states of the guarantees of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

5. Finally, Madison recognized that the ongoing task of making the constitutional system work required a patient willingness to sort out its complexities. As he first explained in Federalist 37, political phenomena were inherently difficult to classify, describe, and delineate. Grand theoretical statements or simple invocations of popular or state sovereignty would not do this work. The American system was a real “non-descript”: it had no true precedents and could only be analyzed inductively, in its messy details.

Save for postulates 4 and 5, the judiciary does not hold a commanding place in these discussions. Yet Madison’s thoughts on the subject still offer important clues to his thinking and to our notions of Madisonian constitution that we often invoke but rarely describe in any serious detail (beyond citing Federalist Nos. 10 and 51).

Early thoughts about the judicial power

When Madison praised the “efficacy” of the British judiciary in 1785, he reflected the prevailing American belief that the independence that Parliament had gained in the Glorious Revolution had since been corrupted by the modes of patronage and influence that allowed the Crown to control Parliament. Parliament could not fulfill its prescribed duty as the embodiment of legislative supremacy because turned too many members of its members had become “placemen” who served as the willing “tools” of the reigning ministry. Madison’s concerns with the role of the judiciary in American republican constitutions were also driven by his perception of the misuse of legislative power. But he was troubled, not by the corruption of American legislatures, but by the defects of deliberation and decision-making that lawmakers routinely revealed.

These defects were the subject of the four concluding items in his seminal April 1787 memorandum on the Vices of the Political System of the United States. Those items addressed the “multiplicity,” “mutability,” “injustice,” and “impotence” of the “laws of the States.” [4] Madison conceded that the burden of waging a revolutionary war had placed an unprecedented burden on their legislatures, and that allowance had to be made for “the situation in which the revolution has placed us.” Yet the problems he identified could not be reduced to that factor alone. “Try the Codes of the several States by this test,” he complained, “and what a luxuriancy of legislation do they present.” Laws enacted so hastily led to their repeal or supersession even “before any trial can have been made of their merits.”

Worse than the “want of wisdom” that these impulsive processes revealed was the “still more alarming” problem of legislative injustice, “not merely because it is a greater evil in itself, but because it brings into question the fundamental principle of republican Government, that the majority who rule in such Governments, are the safest Guardians both of public Good and of private rights.” Madison offered two diagnoses for this fundamental problem. The first involved the  “ambition” and “personal interest” that distorted the decisions of many lawmakers, including those newcomers who fell prey to the manipulations of factious leaders. The second and far more important concerned  “the people themselves,” particularly within the boundaries of individual states , where self-interested and passionate majorities could too easily form.

Madison’s solutions to these problems were both institutional and political. On the institutional side, he wanted to improve the quality of legislative deliberation: by giving the amateur lawmakers who staffed most assemblies longer terms, so they would learn their business better; by constituting select committees to serve as veteran drafters of bills; and by creating genuine senates possessing the confidence to check the impulses of the lower house. On the political side, as he famously proposed in Federalist Nos. 10 and 51, the best cure for the “mischiefs of faction” would lie in creating an “extended republic.” This social complexity would discourage the wrong kinds of factious majorities from forming nationally and also produce a more qualified class of national lawmakers superior to the lesser lights who flourished within the states.

Prior to the Convention, Madison initially gave the judiciary little thought. He was not even sure whether there should be a separate national judiciary. Some national courts of appeal were needed for “cases to which foreigners or inhabitants of other States may be parties,” but perhaps all else that was required was to have state judges swear “fidelity” to the “general” constitution. [5] His thinking did evolve in the succeeding weeks. The Virginia Plan provided for the establishment of “one or more supreme tribunals, and of inferior tribunals to be chosen by the National Legislature.” Judges would enjoy tenure during good behavior, following the rule set in the parliamentary Act of Settlement of 1701, and their salaries would not be subject to legislative alteration. The jurisdiction of national courts would broadly cover “questions which may involve the national peace and harmony,” a tentative yet still quite open-ended grant of authority. [6]

Here was a preliminary basis for making the judiciary an independent department. Yet Madison’s most intriguing thoughts about judicial power bent in a different direction. His most striking proposal was to create a joint executive-judicial council of revision (modeled on the New York constitution) possessing a limited negative (or veto) over legislation. Under Article 8 of the Virginia Plan, this council would have “authority to examine every act of the National Legislature before it should operate, & every act of a particular [state] Legislature before a Negative thereon should be final.” (The latter part of the clause related to the congressional negative on state laws, which we will discuss below.) On the three occasions when this provision was debated, Madison defended it vigorously. One justification for the council rested on the perceived weakness of both the executive and the judiciary. It was to safeguard their authority against the “impetuous vortex” of legislative power that the two politically weaker departments should be formally allied.

It was, however, the other rationale that offers the best insight into Madison’s thinking. Madison wanted leading members of the national judiciary to have an active role in the drafting of legislation. Rather than have judges wait for some suitable case to come before them legally , after a statute was enacted, he wanted them to participate in its adoption. One could fairly object, Madison observed on June 6, “that the judges ought not to be subject to the bias which a participation in the making of the laws might give in the exposition of them” at a later point. Two other points outweighed this concern. First, there would be few occasions when this would occur. Second, and more important, the prior involvement of the judiciary would contribute positively to the enactment of legislation. As Madison remarked on July 21, just before the Framers conclusively rejected the council:

It would be useful to the Judiciary departmt. by giving it an additional opportunity of defending itself agst. Legislative encroachments; It would be useful to the Executive, by inspiring additional confidence & firmness in exerting the revisionary power: It would be useful to the Legislature by the valuable assistance it would give in preserving a consistency, conciseness, perspicuity & technical propriety in the laws, qualities peculiarly necessary; & yet shamefully wanting in our republican Codes. It would moreover be useful to the Community at large as an additional check agst. a pursuit of those unwise & unjust measures which constituted so great a portion of our calamities.

There was thus a trade-off to be weighed and paid. One could impair the strict theory of separated powers that the first state constitutions had endorsed. But the net improvement in lawmaking gained by foreseeing and removing difficulties before they occurred was, in Madison’s eyes, worth this theoretical cost. James Wilson amplified Madison’s point by arguing the value of allowing judges to “remonstrat[e]” against laws that were “unjust,” “unwise,” “dangerous,” or “destructive,” yet not “so unconstitutional” as to demand rejection. [7]

The opponents of the council of revision predictably held that the only way that judges could participate in legislation was in their proper judicial capacity, and not as an advisory body. If judges participated in making laws, that might compromise their capacity to adjudicate them in subsequent proceedings. Perhaps most important, the opponents of the council declared that the judiciary already possessed the capacity to declare laws unconstitutional. In other words, Americans would not have to wait until 1803 for Chief Justice John Marshall to “establish” the legitimacy of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison . The concept of judicial review, though still novel and only partly formed, was something that the Framers already grasped.

The defeat that Madison suffered on these points did not lead him to reject his opinions. A year later, in his Observations on Jefferson’s proposed revision of the Virginia constitution, Madison restated his support for a council of revision—but with several intriguing modifications. The great objective remained to provide “a check to precipitate, to unjust, and to unconstitutional laws.” Rather than submit a bill to a joint council, pending measures should be sent to the executive and judiciary independently. If one department objected, a legislative override would need a two-thirds vote; if both objected, a three-quarters vote. But once the legislature made its decision, “It sd. not be allowed the Judges or the Ex[ecutive] to pronounce a law thus enacted, unconstitul. & invalid.” [8]

That qualification would preserve the principle of ultimate legislative supremacy, admittedly exercised under tough super-majoritarian rules. Madison reaffirmed this point in the next paragraph of the Observations, which addressed the dawning recognition of the doctrine of judicial review.

In the State Constitutions & indeed in the Fedl. one also, no provision is made for the case of a disagreement in expounding them; and as the Courts are generally the last in making their decision, it results to them, by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with its final character. This makes the Judiciary Dept paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was never intended, and can never be proper. [9]

Madison recognized the inherent existence of judicial review, but his analysis questioned whether the judiciary should be the final voice on the constitutional validity of statutes.

Two deeper concerns

Beyond Madison’s concerns with the deliberative qualities of representative bodies, two further problems shaped his attitude toward the judiciary. The first concerned the future uses of legislative power in a commercial and territorially expanding republic. The second was related to the fundamental problems of federalism that had troubled Madison ever since he entered the Continental Congress in 1780.

Madison had a very modern conception of the future uses of legislative power. He understood that legislatures would henceforth form the institutional locus within which multiple economic and social interests would try to bend public power to their own benefit. The business of colonial legislatures had been far more parochial. They enacted few general-purpose statutes; most of their work involved answering petty petitions that emanated from counties, towns, and interested individuals. They were not developing turnpikes and canals or providing for the building of bridges. In many ways, legislatures were still adjudicatory bodies that spent a great deal of time resolving local disputes. [10] That was one of the many complications that made Madison so skeptical about any neat or rigid theory of separated powers.

But once Americans had to govern a vast terrain stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, the local knowledge that amateur lawmakers had carried to their provincial capitals would no longer suffice. National legislators had to acquire national knowledge. Although Madison hoped some members of Congress would aspire to serve more than one term, he rightly foresaw that each biennial Congress would bring major rotations in membership. Even though the Constitution did not require it, rotation in office remained the pervasive practice until the late nineteenth century. Each biennial session created its own educational cycle, as new members arriving from widely scattered districts learned the complexities of public policy on a national scale. Indeed, nothing better indicates how much our political world differs from theirs than this basic disparity in the importance of incumbency. Any political scientist working today assumes that reelection is the dominant motive shaping the behavior of our representatives. That presumption was manifestly not the case in the political world of the founders.

Yet lawmakers would also be active advocates for their constituents’ immediate interests. As one fascinating paragraph of Federalist 10 suggests, legislators would effectively serve as “judges and parties, at the same time.” Particularly in the realm of economic legislation, lawmakers would act judicially, because “what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens; and what are the different classes of legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine?” In the realm of economic policy—laws covering creditors and debtors, producers and consumers, and modes of taxation—all decisions were both judicial and legislative in nature, because they would have different effects on different forms of property, which Americans regarded (along with freedom of conscience) as the most fundamental right of all.

This blurring of lines between what is formally legislative in appearance but latently judicial in nature illustrates the complexity of Madison’s thinking. It also demonstrates why he felt few qualms about blurring or crossing the boundary between the distinct realms of legislation and adjudication, as the council of revision manifestly would have done. If the ultimate end was to secure the best legislation possible before it was enacted, why not adopt a procedure that would bring more “consistency, conciseness, perspicuity & technical propriety” to the task, especially when many representatives were relative amateurs at the legislative game?

Had it been approved, the work of the council of revision would have implicated Madison’s other radical proposal: the negative on state laws that Congress could use either to protect the national government against interference from the states or to protect individuals and minorities against unjust acts. On July 17, the day after it approved the equal state vote in the Senate—to Madison’s great regret—the Convention replaced the negative on state laws with the initial weak version of the Supremacy Clause. The language of that Clause was soon silently strengthened. It ultimately obliged state judges to treat the Constitution, federal laws, and national treaties as “the supreme Law of the Land . . . any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Although even today skeptics argue that the Constitution did not explicitly provide for the exercise of judicial review, that is what the Supremacy Clause actually accomplished.

The principle underlying the Supremacy Clause resolved a problem that had long vexed Madison. From the start of his congressional career, he actively worried about how the states could be persuaded, encouraged, or coerced to fulfill their federal obligations. The prevailing theory underlying the Articles of Confederation was not a “proto-Calhoun” [11] belief that the states had a sovereign right to decide whether or not to implement the measures that Congress sent their way. It was rather that the states should adapt all those measures to local conditions, acting in effect as administrative arms of Congress. In the early 1780s, Madison believed that Congress should have the authority to compel states to do their duty. Although Congress never pursued this idea, Madison was still contemplating the advantages of coercing delinquent states in 1787.

Yet once the Convention began, Madison concluded that schemes of coercion were more likely to provoke civil conflict rather than orderly governance. The negative on state laws, which was modeled on the veto power the king had previously exercised over the colonies, became the next solution to this problem. The power would vest in Congress, but the council of revision would in turn use its limited negative to ensure that Congress acted appropriately. Once these two provisions were eliminated, the default option for policing conflicts over federalism fell to the federal judiciary, or more specifically to the Supreme Court.

Madison remained unconvinced that this was the best means to ensure that the states would conform to the new federal system. Privately, he still viewed the negative on state laws as a better mechanism than judicial enforcement. He laid out his rationale in a lengthy letter to Jefferson, written a month after the Convention adjourned:

It may be said that the Judicial authority under our new system will keep the States within their proper limits, and supply the place of a negative on their laws. The answer is that it is more convenient to prevent the passage of a law, than to declare it void after it is passed; that this will be particularly the case where the law aggrieves individuals, who may be unable to support an appeal against a State to the supreme Judiciary, that a State which would violate the Legislative rights of the Union, would not be very ready to obey a Judicial decree in support of them, and that a recurrence to force, which in the event of disobedience would be necessary, is an evil which the new Constitution meant to exclude as far as possible. [12]

Yet in the months after Madison drafted this impassioned letter, he accommodated himself to the constraints that the Constitution imposed.

The critical passage illustrating his thinking appeared in Federalist 39. The second half of this essay was devoted to a five-pronged assessment of the federal (that is, state-based) and national properties of the Constitution. Near the close of this analysis, Madison raised the delicate question of the resolution of the inevitable controversies over the respective jurisdictions of the state and national governments.

It is true that in controversies relating to the boundary between the two jurisdictions, the tribunal which is ultimately to decide, is to be established under the general Government. But this does not change the principle of the case. The decision is to be impartially made, according to the rules of the Constitution; and all the usual and most effectual precautions are taken to secure this impartiality. Some such tribunal is clearly essential to prevent an appeal to the sword, and a dissolution of the compact; and that it ought to be established under the general, rather than under the local Governments; or to speak more properly, that it could be safely established under the first alone, is a position not likely to be combated.

In fact, thirty years later, Spencer Roane, chief judge of the Virginia court of appeals (and Patrick Henry’s son-in-law), did actively combat this conclusion. But the succinct statement of Federalist 39 defined the orthodoxy that Madison consistently defended.

Madison’s principle merits two important comments. First, it demonstrates conclusively not only that judicial review was clearly part of the original meaning of the Constitution— its existence textually confirmed by the Supremacy Clause—but also that its main or more obvious use would involve questions of federalism rather than separation of powers. Second, when one turns to Madison’s seminal essays on the separation of powers in Federalist 47-51, judicial power is made conspicuous by its absence. Perhaps this was a mere omission on Madison’s part; perhaps it reflected his belief that the critical issue of separation of powers was the relationship between president and Congress; or perhaps it reflected his sense that the whole “doctrine” was too messy and “obscure” a subject to be amenable to any tidy resolution. Once one reaches the concluding essay, Federalist 51, it is striking how little Madison finally says about separation of powers. He devoted only a single paragraph to the institutional workings of checks and balances; instead, the second half of the essay largely restates the ideas of Federalist 10, which said almost nothing about institutions but was devoted instead to the mischief-curing benefits of a multiplicity of factions in society. The awkward conclusion remains that in 1787-88 Madison’s nominal commitment to the role the judiciary would play in resolving conflicts of federalism did not inspire him to say all that much about how the judiciary would operate.

Lessons learned

Three decades later, in retirement at Montpelier, experience gave Madison a different framework for thinking about the role of the judiciary in the federal republic.

When George Washington began staffing the federal judiciary in 1789, loyalty to the Constitution was the first criterion of appointment. One had to have been part of the Federalist movement that supported ratification of the Constitution. Twelve years later, President John Adams made membership in the Federalist Party the first criterion for seats in the new circuit courts the Judiciary Act of 1801 had just created. Madison’s most celebrated contribution to the annals of constitutional case law took place as the named (though absent) defendant in Marbury v. Madison (1803), over his refusal to deliver the same magistrate’s commission that Secretary of State John Marshall had failed to transmit to William Marbury. It says something about the institutional weakness of the federal judiciary at this point to note (a) that President Jefferson and Madison simply ignored Marbury’s case; (b) that Marshall’s opinion went out of its way to render grand pronouncements superfluous to the resolution of the case; and (c) that a week after Marbury was decided, a majority of the Court ducked its real challenge, holding in Stuart v. Laird that the abolition (through the Repeal Act of 1802) of the circuit court positions created in 1801 was constitutionally permissible, even though the new judges enjoyed the “tenure during good behavior” rule of Article III.

That rule presumed that this condition of tenure, reinforced by professional norms of behavior and republican honor, would maintain judicial independence. The fidelity to the Constitution that Washington expected of the first generation of national jurists was more a minimal condition of recruitment than a hard test of political loyalty. But the partisan tumult of the 1790s raised the entry price of this fidelity. The Judiciary Act of 1801 was a calculated Federalist response to the party’s loss of control over all three political institutions of the national government. If one had reliable ways to know or test the political commitments of judicial appointees, Article III, if exploited quickly, would enable the Federalists to ensure their control of one branch of government for years to come. The real logic of Article III thus promoted the opposite of judicial independence. One could argue, not all that perversely, that the judicial ambitions of the Federalist Party in 1801 anticipated the judicial ambitions of the Federalist Society almost 200 years later.

Yet beyond the repeal of the 1801 Act and the failed impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase, Jefferson and Madison did not pursue a radical effort to reshape the federal judiciary. High among the various explanations for their moderation was their avowed desire to restore a political system in which the contentious party loyalties of the 1790s would dissipate and disappear. The goal of the first party system, in their view, was to drive the Federalists into collapse, and then to restore a system in which organized national parties would play no part. Under this presumption, using tenure during good behavior to stock the judiciary with loyalists was not their highest priority.

What did persist in Madison’s thinking about the judiciary were two other concerns: first, that the Supreme Court not endorse the full Hamiltonian interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause, as expressed during the bank debate of 1791; and second, that it play the umpiring role Madison had assigned it in Federalist 39. The best elaboration of these views came after Judge Spencer Roane tried to recruit Madison to support his proposition that the federal and state supreme courts acted on a level plane of authority, and that disagreements between them did not require an ultimate resolution. Roane began forming these ideas in response to Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1814), but the key exchanges took place after McCulloch v. Maryland (the bank case, 1819) and Cohens v. Virginia (1821), a contrived case involving the interstate purchase of lottery tickets that Chief Justice Marshall used to restate the principle of federal judicial supremacy.

In his first response to Roane, Madison politely deflected the invitation to equate the authority of federal and state supreme courts by focusing instead on Marshall’s opinion in McCulloch . That opinion decidedly echoed Hamilton by emphasizing the discretionary power the Necessary and Proper Clause invested in Congress. Madison had long conceded that the course of discussion since 1791 had legitimated the incorporation of a national bank. But he still distinguished that particular precedent from the general doctrine Marshall was propounding. If one read the Clause as broadly as Marshall did, no effective restraint would prevent Congress from defining the scope of its own legislative authority. Marshall’s mode of interpretation “seems to break down the landmarks [a favorite Madison word] intended by a specification of the Powers of Congress, and to substitute for a definite connection between means and ends, a Legislative discretion as to the former to which no practical limit can be assigned.” [13]   Had the Federalists presented such a reading of the Clause to the American people in 1787, the Constitution might well have been rejected. (This tracks the inventive approach to originalism that Madison had pioneered in 1796.)

When Roane renewed his plea in 1821, however, the discussion transcended a clausal reading of the Constitution to focus on the deeper problem of jurisdiction. In two further letters—one labored, the other more direct—Madison refuted Roane’s request on two basic grounds. If one wished to secure “the reserved sovereignty of the States” within the federal system, he argued, the greater danger lay not in the Supreme Court but in the expansive legislative power of Congress. Implicit in this response was the recognition that the South would hereafter be a political minority needing protection against the North. Second, and more important, Madison saw no alternative to supporting the primacy of the Supreme Court over the contending claims Roane had made for its counterparts in the states. [14]

Roane had another prominent reader, however, who proved more sympathetic to his claims: Thomas Jefferson. If serious conflicts arose between state and federal courts, on Roane’s model of a parity between them, why not submit these disputes, Jefferson asked, to the “ultimate arbiter[,] the people of the Union, assembled by their deputies in convention, at the call of Congress or of two-thirds of the States” [15] This revised a proposal Jefferson had made back in the 1780s, and which Madison had subjected to respectful but devastating criticism in Federalist Nos. 49-50. Believing that the stability of the republic rested in part on the “salutary veneration” that the people should express for the Constitution, Madison offered two responses to this proposal. The first was to argue that courts at both levels should try to limit the danger of judicial confrontations by avoiding the kinds of grand overstatements of positions that both Marshall and Roane were prone to giving. Judicial doctrine should evolve case by case, the better to “obviate the dilemma of a Judicial rencounter [sic] or a mutual paralysis” between state and national benches. The second was finally to adhere to the wisdom of Federalist 39 and work to ensure that the sources of “impartiality” in judicial decision-making would be protected, while conceding that in the final analysis there could be no alternative to federal judicial supremacy. [16]

Lessons for the present

Madison’s desire for impartiality in interpretation now seems a lost fantasy of innocence from another constitutional age. True, much of the legal work that modern judges and justices perform reliably depends on precedent, doctrine, and professional competence. The judiciary as a whole is hardly running amok. But when one leaves the well-ploughed fields of ordinary law to tramp the cratered terrain of constitutional interpretation, our confidence in judicial independence evaporates. The ever-escalating crisis of judicial appointments—a one-way ratchet of politicization—makes Madison’s belief that tenure during good behavior would secure judicial independence and impartiality appear delusional.

Exactly the opposite result now applies. In a system that supports the intense ideological vetting of judicial candidates, apparently often conducted by advocacy groups acting outside of government, the sacred rule of tenure during good behavior operates as an independent variable that promotes the appointment of politically reliable judges. Nominees happily pledge to perform as umpires calling balls and strikes or faithful adherents of the original Constitution—nothing more and nothing less. No candid observer can take those claims seriously. But the discovery of this potentiality was made in 1801, not two centuries later in Bush v. Gore (2000). Although the force and appeal of political reliability have waxed and waned over time, the ever-worsening deterioration and weaponization of the federal judicial appointments process is less a deviant departure from a disinterested norm than a sour fulfillment of the Constitution’s latent possibilities.

Madison offers no obvious solution to this problem. His ideal notion of judicial appointments rested on distinguishing the professional credentials of jurists from the novice legislators who would rotate in and out of Congress. The best outcome he hoped for was that if one could leave the contested politics of the 1790s astern, the partisan bonds of the first party system could give way to a more professional, moderated mode of judging. But if intense partisanship continues to color and distort judicial appointments, as every sign indicates it will, Madison offers no ready answer to the problem, beyond hoping that the process would select judges prepared to resolve controversies on a case-by-case basis, avoiding grand statements of interpretive theory in order to focus on working out the inherently messy details of the American constitutional system. The question that is left open today is whether some other feasible form of judicial appointment could be imagined. Any move in that direction would require the daunting project of an Article V amendment.

On two other matters, however, one can draw strong inferences about the norms that Madison would apply to contemporary dilemmas of constitutional jurisprudence. On one of these points, Madison’s conclusions seem fairly obvious; on the other, some creative thinking could reshape one of his ideas to contemporary purposes.

As I have proposed elsewhere, the most Madisonian part of the Constitution may well be Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified thirty-two years after his death. [17] At first glance this claim seems inherently specious. Yet the dominant motif in Madison’s approach to the protection of constitutional rights rested on the belief that the real danger to rights in a republic would not come from the arbitrary concentrated power of a central government. It would arise instead from popular majorities acting instrumentally through the legislature, and these majorities would form much more easily at the state and local level than in an extended national republic. [18] The congressional negative on state laws was his preferred, if likely impracticable, solution to this problem. Yet if over time federal justices and judges acquired the confidence and demonstrated the capacity to enforce rights against legislative majorities within the states, that outcome would have delighted Madison. The three prongs of Section 1 (equal protection, due process, and privileges and immunities) made that protection possible, even if many decades passed before the incorporation doctrine became a living possibility.

No better illustration of this phenomenon exists than the system of racial segregation that emerged in the late nineteenth century. That was and remains—along with its precursor, the peculiar institution of chattel slavery that Jim Crow replaced—the primary example of the denial of civil rights in American history. As Madison privately observed in 1791, “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact . .  . . The Southern States of America, are, on the same principle aristocracies.” [19] One could easily apply the Republican Guarantee Clause of Article IV to reach a similar conclusion about Jim Crow, which was the logical continuation of that situation: a clear demonstration of the way in which state-based majorities could trample fundamental rights. One could similarly argue that the predictable consequences of the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013),  which quickly inspired fresh efforts to suppress or minimize the African American vote, embodies yet another modern application of this same animus.

Of course, one cannot unthinkingly transpose Madison’s eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century opinions into contemporary debates. One cannot formulate an intelligent prediction of how Madison would have thought about Roe v. Wade . Or as Justice Samuel Alito quipped in an exchange with Justice Antonin Scalia during the oral argument in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association , "I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games.” [20] Of course, there are some issues where one can draw reasonably plausible, perhaps even persuasive inferences about how Madison would have thought about particular cases. Given his known qualms about chaplains pronouncing essentially sectarian invocations for public meetings, it is difficult if not indeed impossible to imagine Madison endorsing the Supreme Court’s opinion in Town of Greece v. Galloway , permitting just such a routine. [21] But to conjure a coherent prediction about how Madison would have thought about cases like Hobby Lobby v. Burwell or Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission beggars the historian’s imagination. Such predictions, to borrow the lawyer’s phrase, would depend on “facts not in evidence.”

Yet on another more fundamental point, it is indeed possible, I believe, to posit a Madisonian position on the role of the judiciary in the American “political system” (to evoke Madison’s April 1787 memorandum formulating his agenda for the Philadelphia convention). The underlying premise of Madison’s entire theory of republican government was that the wrong kinds of “factious” majorities were more likely to form within the states individually than nationally. If the Supreme Court acquired the capacity and authority to act vigorously to protect rights within the states, Madison would have been all in favor of that result. Given a choice between the Warren Court, on the one hand, and the Rehnquist or Roberts Courts, on the other, I strongly suspect Madison would have preferred the former. (This is why the Federalist Society should renounce its perfidious expropriation of Madison’s profile as its institutional logo.)

The second contemporary dilemma relates to Madison’s council of revision. The specific case that Madison and James Wilson made for the council no longer seems relevant. With the professionalization of legislative service, the growth of congressional staffs, and the amount of knowledge available to both Congress and especially to the presidency, there is no obvious need to involve jurists in lawmaking for the purpose of improving the quality of legislative deliberation. Yet one could still wonder whether prior judicial involvement in lawmaking would reduce and mitigate the constitutional storms that sometimes rage over legislation, as the post-enactment history of the Affordable Care Act illustrates so amply. In 1787 one could have hardly imagined the extent to which constitutional law has become (to give Clausewitz’s famous dictum a fresh application) a continuation of politics by other means. Constitutional law, as such, did not really exist before 1789. It had no real precedent in British or colonial practice, and Americans were still grappling to define what it would mean to treat a constitution as supreme fundamental law. [22] Yet Madison’s idea of a council of revision did at least realize that judicial counsel on the constitutional aspects of a statute could be helpful in its formation. Modern constitutional courts in other nations now often operate in a similar fashion, encouraging ex ante review rather than ex post litigation. Applying the lessons they have learned while avoiding a direct replication of the American approach to judicial review might provide some helpful lessons. Rather than ratchet up the tensions that accompany the post-enactment testing of the constitutionality of a statute, in a Supreme Court that is acutely divided on partisan lines and often reaches predictable 5-4 decisions on just these kinds of cases, some moderated version of Madison’s council of revision might have beneficial consequences.

A bit of wisdom from Federalist 49 would be helpful here. In that essay, midway through his discussion of the separation of powers, Madison went out of his way to analyze a proposal that no one else in 1788 was discussing: Jefferson’s idea, espoused in his Notes on the State of Virginia , to resolve constitutional disputes among the branches by calling popularly elected conventions to settle the matter. Amid his various criticisms of this idea, Madison mentioned the dangers that would arise from a repeated use of this expedient: “frequent appeals,” he warned, “would, in a great measure, deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on every thing, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.” Veneration itself had a positive value in maintaining the stability of a constitutional system. Suspecting as we plausibly do that too many constitutional decisions made today nakedly reflect the political biases that inflect and infect the entire judicial appointments process, who can “venerate” modern constitutional jurisprudence as a principled endeavor to clarify (or “liquidate,” as Madison would have said) the meaning of the Constitution? Allowing Justices to participate at some prior point in the adoption of legislation—in a manner akin to the rejected council of revision—would not wholly eliminate the partisan impulses that wrack our constitutional system, but it might help to enhance our veneration of constitutional norms.

The Madison who did so much to frame the Constitution in 1787, though never inclined to practice law, was a keen and informed observer of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A concern with legislative deliberation was then the dominant variable in his constitutional thought. But he was also a deeply empirical thinker, and as the Constitution took effect, reassessing the nature of the power that the executive and judiciary branches would wield became subjects to which he gave fresh attention. We are entitled to reassess the judicial power of the United States with a similar critical commitment.

[1] This essay draws upon my prior writings, including “The Origins of Judicial Review: A Plea for New Contexts,” Stanford Law Review , 49 (1996-1997), 1031-1064;  “Judicial Power in the Constitutional Theory of James Madison,” William and Mary Law Review , 43 (2001-2002), 1513-1547; Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1996); and A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison (Norman, OK, 2017).

[2] Mary Sarah Bilder, “James Madison, Law Student and Demi-Lawyer.” Law and History Review , 28 (2010), 389-449.

[3] Letter from James Madison to Caleb Wallace, Aug. 23, 1785, in Jack N. Rakove, ed., James Madison: Writings (New York, 1999), 42; (hereafter Madison: Writings ).

[4] Vices of the Political System of the United States, Madison: Writings, 74-80, for this and the following paragraphs.

[5] Letter from James Madison to George Washington, April 16, 1787, in Madison: Writings , 82.

[6] Letter from James Madison to George Washington, 90-91.

[7] Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911, 1937, 1966), I, 138-139; II, 73-80.

[8] James Madison, Observations on the “Draught of a Constitution for Virginia,” Madison: Writings , 417.

[9]  Madison, "Observations," 417.

[10] See the important article by Christine Desan, “The Constitutional Commitment to Legislative Adjudication in the Early American Tradition,” Harvard Law Review , 111 (1998), 1381.

[11] John C. Calhoun was a South Carolina senator who used a states’ rights argument to protect slavery during the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33.

[12] Letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Oct. 24, 1787, in Madison: Writings , 148-149.

[13] James Madison to Spencer Roane, Sept. 2, 1819, Madison: Writings , 733-736.

[14] James Madison to Spencer Roane, May 6 and June 29,1821, in Madison: Writings , 772-779.

[15] Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Justice William Johnson, June 12, 1823, available at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-justice-william-johnson/.

[16] James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, June 27, 1823, in Madison: Writings , 798-802.

[17] Jack Rakove, Original Meanings (Vintage: 1997), 336-338.

[18] The classic analysis comes in Madison’s letter to Jefferson of Oct. 17, 1788, in Madison: Writings , 419-423.

[19] Robert Rutland et al ., eds., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962-1999), 14: 163-164.

[20] 564 U.S. 786 (2011).

[21] 134 S. Ct. 1811 (2014).

[22] On this massively important point, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), chapter 8; and Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Cambridge, 2018).

More from the National Constitution Center

Constitution 101

Explore our new 15-unit core curriculum with educational videos, primary texts, and more.

Search and browse videos, podcasts, and blog posts on constitutional topics.

Founders’ Library

Discover primary texts and historical documents that span American history and have shaped the American constitutional tradition.

News & Debate

Modal title.

Modal body text goes here.

Share with Students

James Madison University Undergraduate College Application Essays

These James Madison University college application essays were written by students accepted at James Madison University. All of our sample college essays include the question prompt and the year written. Please use these sample admission essays responsibly.

Join Now to View Premium Content

GradeSaver provides access to 2360 study guide PDFs and quizzes, 11007 literature essays, 2767 sample college application essays, 926 lesson plans, and ad-free surfing in this premium content, “Members Only” section of the site! Membership includes a 10% discount on all editing orders.

• Browse College Application Essays
• Undergraduate

College Application Essays accepted by James Madison University

New sickness infects high school students nationwide suzanne lassise, james madison university.

ELLICOTT CITY, MD--- It is 12 AM and parents everywhere believe their teenagers are snug in bed. However, instead of sleeping, their kids are wide awake, studying every ounce of information they could be tested on in a matter of hours. Believing...

How Swimming Has Affected My Life Rebecca Papritz

Giving up my weekend nights for swim practice was something I was used to by the time I reached high school. Swimming, I felt, was my niche, and with that niche came many sacrifices. Yet, for all the “hardships” that came with it, I earned the...

The Performance Changed the Performer Anonymous

Two flamboyant characters sat in the center of the first row; I saw their hands dancing wildly in the air while I tiptoed quietly into the theatre so as not to pop their bubble of eccentricity. However, the heavy door’s loud click as it closed...

Unique Eyes Grace Sheridan

Eye color was evenly divided in my family before I was born: two sets of blue eyes and two sets of green eyes. My birth would have traditionally tipped the scales, but I was born with one blue eye and one green. This anomaly was originally...

A Transformative Experience Anonymous

As the sunlight began to dim, my panic rose. The street signs were incomprehensible, and any request for assistance only resulted in a barrage of unfamiliar German. I found myself hoping for a rapid rescue, yet I knew that I needed to find my own...

Good ole days Jake Galante

"I think I'm ready to go home now," I inform my roommate Patrick, yet again, as we mix cement and shovel rocks for hours upon hours under the beating Mexican sun. It is Tuesday of our week-long mission trip to Nuevo Durango, and I already feel...

The Pastor's Daughter Lauren DeRoco

I nervously sat down to the computer and started typing. Creating an Evite wouldn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but it was to me. Always having been too shy to reach out to my teammates from soccer, I had never been included in their...

The Art of War Goes to Chick-fil-a Andrew Branson

It is 7:00 on Saturday morning and I walk into the Chick-fil-a kitchen. Attempting to prepare my mind for work, I enter my daydream of war to get through the upcoming seemingly endless morning. My ingredients suddenly turn into weapons and armor;...

The Type of Doctor I Want to Be Jordan V. Oliver

After completing an hour of training with the overworked nurses of Johnston-Willis Hospital, I acquainted myself with Holly, a frail ninety year old woman who, along with fighting terminal cancer, was recovering from a stroke that also impaired...

Recent Questions about James Madison University

The Question and Answer section for James Madison University is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

James Madison University

Founded in 1908, James Madison University is a public university located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. JMU is fast becoming one of the nation’s leading lights in higher education because students enjoy unusually engaged relationships with world-class faculty who are here because they want to pursue knowledge and make teaching their No. 1 priority.

Academic programs.

• Art & Design
• Communication
• Engineering
• Finance/Accounting
• Government/Political Science
• Health Science
• Liberal Arts
• Performing Arts
• Social Science
• Visual Arts

Student experience

• Disability Services
• Intramural/Club Sports
• Military/Veteran Services
• On-Campus Housing
• ROTC Program
• Study Abroad
• Undergraduate Research
• Veteran Fee Waiver

Application information

Find out about requirements, fees, and deadlines

Completing your application is easy! STEP 1: Submit your application ($70 fee). Step 2:  Submit an official high school transcript, including any dual-enrollment courses you may be taking. For transcripts to be considered official, they must be sent through the Common App, or another secure provider such as Naviance/Parchment, e-Scrip Safe, etc., or by mail from your school. If sending by mail, please use the following address: James Madison University Office of Admissions – MSC 0101 100 E Grace Street Harrisonburg, VA 22807 Please note, JMU will not accept recommendation letters that arrive via Parchment, postal mail, etc.

To apply for transfer admission, you should have completed at least 24 credit hours post high-school graduation before you would start classes at JMU. If you’ll have completed less than 24 credit hours, please contact your regional recruiter . Priority is given to applicants with associate degrees, or at least 48 college credits. Competitive transfer applicants have at least a 3.0 GPA and have completed college course work in English, mathematics, social science and lab science.  For more information, please see the Transfer Applicants section of our website.

Additional Information

Our home is in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a region known for the Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah National Park, the Shenandoah River, rolling farmland and breathtaking views. Only two hours from Washington, D.C., JMU's 675-acre campus is convenient to ski slopes and fishing, as well as coffee shops and live music. For more information about visiting our beautiful campus, please click here .  

JMU graduates are far more than merely educated. Members of a fellowship of doers, they know how to make things happen. They’ve honed their ability to think critically. They’ve learned the importance of a strong work ethic and have become committed to and skilled at collaborating with others. Diplomas in hand, they leave campus determined to live lives of meaning and pursue careers of purpose.

Admissions office

100 South Main Street , MSC 0101 Harrisonburg , VA 22807 , United States of America

Phone number

540-568-5681

For first-year students

Admissions website.

www.jmu.edu/admissions/undergrad/index.shtml

Financial aid website

www.jmu.edu/financialaid/

View more in this region

Follow James Madison University

• Facebook icon
• Twitter icon
• Youtube icon
• Instagram icon

Application Preview

Once you have completed your registration, the application process could take up to several hours to complete. You can save your work and return to where you left off at any time (before the application deadline). The following is a general outline of application questions.

*These are general descriptions of the writing you will be expected to do. Please see the actual application for the specific prompt.

Tips for Making a Great Application

Review the entire application to ensure that you have time to complete it and to gather the necessary documents.

Review all the section prompts before answering any to ensure that answers are in the most appropriate categories.

Write all information at a graduate level, including capital letters at the beginning of sentences; no textspeak or emoticons; etc. The Selection Committee will see your application exactly as you submit it.

Thoughtfully answer each question; polish and proofread your answers.

It will be to your advantage to answer all questions, even those marked optional.

Use most-to-all available characters in your responses. Short responses might be perceived as a lack of effort on your part.

Avoid casual responses.

If cutting/pasting from elsewhere, edit the original to ensure that answers match the prompts.

Ensure that your educational history (institutions, courses, GPA’s) match the transcripts that you submit.

Diligently research the plan of constitutional studies at your proposed university and list specific course numbers and course titles. Explain why you chose these particular courses and how they fit in with your overall degree program, especially regarding your study of the Constitution.

Use Question #2 in the Professional Strengths and Attributes section to fill in any of the gaps in your professional or academic background. Tell the Selection Committee why, for example, you did not work outside the home for 10 years; or why your low junior college GPA is not an accurate predictor of the type of student you are today; or why you live in State A but plan to earn your degree in State B; etc. This is your opportunity to “fill in the blanks.”

Encourage the writers of your recommendations to discuss specific attributes, personal qualities, and professional accomplishments—especially those that were not addressed elsewhere in the application. Send your recommenders a copy of your résumé and, if possible, your responses to the various questions in the application.

Follow up with your recommenders to ensure that they submit their recommendations on time. They are busy people, and they will appreciate a gentle reminder from you as the due date nears.

Complete your application in sufficient time for someone else to review it and provide you with comments.

Christy Marrella-Davis

New jersey fellow.

Thank you so much for the great gift you bestowed on me and my students.

Chris Cavanaugh

Indiana fellow.

The Madison Fellowship is one of the proudest professional accomplishments of my career.

On Property by James Madison

“Conscience is the Most Sacred of Property”: James Madison’s Essay on Property by Tony Williams

On January 24, 1774, James Madison wrote to a college friend praising the Boston Tea Party, which had occurred only weeks before.  He praised the Boston patriots for their boldness in “defending liberty and property.”  Equating political and civil liberty, he warned that if the Church of England had established itself as the official religion of all the colonies, then “slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us.”

Madison had in mind the religious tyranny that he was then witnessing in Virginia.  In an adjacent county to his home, a half dozen itinerant Baptist ministers were in jail for preaching the Gospel to all who would listen, even from their jail cells.  Baptists and other dissenting Christians had suffered horrific violations of their religious liberty when they were horsewhipped on stage or violently driven out of towns for preaching without a license.  Madison lamented that a “diabolical Hell-conceived principle of persecution rages,” and asked his friend to “pray for liberty of conscience to revive among us.”

The young Madison believed that religious liberty was an essential right of mankind.  Educated at Princeton under the tutelage of Rev. John Witherspoon, he was imbued with the ideas of religious and political liberty from the Scottish Enlightenment.  Madison told his friend, “That liberal catholic and equitable way of thinking as to the rights of conscience, which is one of the characteristics of a free people.”

In April, 1776, with the war raging, a twenty-five-year-old Madison was elected to the Virginia Convention, the popular government created after the flight of the royal governor.  On May 15, the Convention instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to “propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent states, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the crown or parliament of Great Britain.”  On June 7, 1776, Virginian Richard Henry Lee would offer such a resolution leading to Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence and the fateful debate and decision for independence.

On the very same day in May, the Congress adopted a resolution calling on the colonies to “adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents.”  The resolution, which John Adams believed was “independence itself,” was introduced by his preamble which stated that the “exercise of every kind of authority under the said Crown should be totally suppressed.”  The Congress thus was stating the Lockean principle that the sovereign people were creating republican self-government with the purpose of protecting their rights.

The Virginia Convention immediately followed Congress’ exhortation and appointed a committee to draft a constitution and a Declaration of Rights.  George Mason penned the Declaration of Rights, which was, in the words of Edmund Randolph, “a perpetual standard” in the principles of government.  It stated that the government was rooted upon a social compact in which the sovereign people were by nature free and equal, and had certain inalienable rights.  When the government became destructive of the people’s liberties, they could overthrow tyrannical government.   The Declaration of Rights then included the principles of separation of powers, free elections, rights of the accused, and freedom of the press.

Mason then expressed what was considered an enlightened view of religious toleration.  His draft of the declaration stated, “All men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”  Madison rejected the idea of mere tolerance for another’s rights and proposed different amendments that would fundamentally secure the right of religious conscience.  The final version read, “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”  Although the declaration did not immediately disestablish the official Anglican Church, Madison’s statement that religious conscience was an inalienable right of man meant that it could not long endure.

In fact, Madison would be at the center of the struggle over establishment a decade later when Virginian legislators took up the issue of Patrick Henry’s bill for a general assessment for religion.  After some brilliant politics that delayed the consideration of the bill and pushed Henry into the governorship, Madison led the forces of disestablishment with his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance” against religious taxes.  He wrote, “The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.  This right is in its nature an unalienable right.”  Madison continued, stating that, “It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.”  That duty is built into the fabric of human nature and precedes the claims of civil society.  “We maintain therefore that in matters of religion, no man’s right is abridged by the institution of civil society and that religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.”  If there is a sense here of separation of church and state, Madison’s understanding is that the government must not interfere with the inalienable rights of liberty of conscience.

In the First Congress, Madison fulfilled the promise of the Federalists to ratify amendments to the Constitution protecting essential liberties though not altering the structure of the government.  The First Amendment reflected decades of Madison’s serious thought and work protecting religious liberty.  Although Madison wanted the Bill of Rights applied to the states, he lost the debate, and the First Amendment specifically limited the power of Congress to establish an official national church or to interfere with freedom of conscience.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  He had been at the forefront of the twin goals of disestablishment and religious liberty as a natural right in Virginia during the American Revolution and now at the national level during the founding of the American republic.

In 1791 and 1792, Madison wrote a series of essays on the principles of republican government for Philip Freneau’s highly partisan National Gazette .  On March 29, 1792, Madison published his “On Property” essay, which posited a new understanding of a property in natural rights.  Madison writes that property is much more than merely land or wealth, and “embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right.”  In this sense, every person “has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.”  The most essential right in human nature is religious liberty, in Madison’s estimation.  “He has a peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.”  He sums up his thinking about property by stating, “In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”

Madison then brilliantly explored the very purpose of republican self-government to protect the inalienable rights of mankind, striking another Lockean chord.  “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort,” he writes, “This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own .”  For Madison, it was a moral principle that the government must act justly and fulfill its purposes.  His social compact thinking mirrored that of the Declaration of Independence.  He wrote:

More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a government, where a man’s religious rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy.  Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part of positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right . . . [There is] no title to invade a man’s conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

Madison averred that the United States government was not a government that violated the sacred rights of mankind.  Indeed, it was instituted to protect those rights.  “If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property . . . and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties . . . that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.”  Madison finished his essay with more conditional logic, stating that if the new republic wished to be known for wise and just government, it would “respect the rights of property, and the property in rights.”

James Madison spent a lifetime thinking about the natural right of religious liberty and in public service doggedly working to protect it at the state and national level from government intrusion.  The current administration shows either a willful ignorance or a remarkable disregard for Madison’s career-long defense of freedom of conscience to so openly and blatantly violate the property rights that Roman Catholics and other religious people have in their conscience.  Thus, we are reminded of the importance of studying history and the Constitution that we may understand American founding principles and firmly stand united against any violations of religious and civil liberty by the government.

Read On Property by James Madison here: https://constitutingamerica.org/?p=3759

Tony Williams is the Program Director for the Washington-Jefferson-Madison Institute in Charlottesville, VA, and the author of four books including, America’s Beginnings: The Dramatic Events that Shaped a Nation’s Character .

Monday, March 25, 2013 – Essay #26

Indeed, Mr. Williams, if we don’t study our Nation’s history and the centuries of groundwork that were laid, we will lose all of our rights and our Nation will become a failed Socialist utopia. We must understand what we are fighting for and why we are fighting for it. The United STates really is the greatest, most exceptional Nation on the face of the Earth. If citizens don’t understand or appreciate that, such as our President, we are doomed. Excellent essay and amazing history lesson.

Join the discussion! Post your comments below.

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Facts and Figures
• Undergraduate Admissions
• Graduate Admissions
• Non-traditional Admissions
• Pay Deposit
• Undergraduate Majors
• Graduate Programs
• Honors College
• Study Abroad
• Professional & Continuing
• Online Programs
• Career Planning
• Living on Campus
• Clubs & Organizations
• Spirit & Traditions
• About Harrisonburg
• Pay Your Deposit
• Office of Financial Aid
• Freshman Scholarships

• James Madison University -->
• Check Status
• Schedule a Visit
• Virtual Visit
• Group Visits
• Traveling to and from JMU
• Places to Stay
• Directions to JMU
• Request Info
• Freshman Info
• Transfer Info
• International Info
• Dates and Deadlines
• Military Applicants
• Homeschool Applicants
• JMU Employees
• Previously Enrolled
• Adult Degree Program
• Certificate Programs
• Individual Courses
• For Counselors
• Other Resources

Apply to JMU as a...

Other Populations

• JMU Employee
• Undergraduate Re-entry

Back to Top

• Expenditures
• Accessibility
• Social Media

I Asked Chat GPT to Take on the Persona of James Madison. Here’s What It Said

Jacobs is a journalist and author whose books include Drop Dead Healthy , The Year of Living Biblically , and The Puzzler . He is host of the podcast The Puzzler, and his latest book is THE YEAR OF LIVING CONSTITUTIONALLY: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning

A while back, I went on a quest to figure out and—and live by—the original meaning of America’s Founding document: the Constitution. I bore a musket on the streets of New York. I renounced social media in favor of expressing his First Amendment right to scribble pamphlets with a quill pen. The reason for this quest was fueled by the rise of “originalism” —the judicial philosophy espoused by five of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court —that says the most important factor in interpreting the Constitution is the original meaning of the text when it was ratified in 1789. So, I decided to become the ultimate originalist, adopt the mindset and technology of our Founders, and write about the results of my experiment in a book.

Read More: Top 10 Literary Stunts—The Year of Living Biblically

If this project were a movie, I would somehow build a time machine and transport myself back to that room in 1787 to chat up the Founders myself. Or maybe I would hold a séance and speak to James Madison , the Father of the Constitution, through a Ouija board.

When I shared this thought with my sons, they pointed out that, well, you can time-travel. Sort of. Just log on to ChatGPT and tell it to take on the persona of James Madison. Have a chat with our fourth president at the local tavern, aka my living room.

I’m intrigued by this idea, but I also have some trepidation. ChatGPT has not been super reliable in my chats with it so far. A few weeks ago, Lucas asked ChatGPT, “What are the names of A.J. Jacobs’s children?”

To which ChatGPT responded, “A.J. Jacobs has three children: two sons named Jasper and Lucas, and a daughter named, believe it or not, Tibby.”

First of all, I didn’t appreciate the attitude with the “believe it or not.” Why so judgy? Second, I don’t believe it, because I have three sons and zero daughters. There is no Tibby. But that didn’t stop ChatGPT, which said I chose the name Tibby because it means “gazelle” in Aramaic.

Still, ChatGPT is an amazing tool. It has ingested everything Madison ever wrote. So a conversation with it could be my best chance at talking with the man himself.

So on a Tuesday night, I signed on to ChatGPT and asked it,

What would James Madison say about how to fix America? Please answer as James Madison.

Robo-Madison responded immediately. 

My dear countrymen,

The issues that face America today are vastly different from those we grappled with at the Constitutional Convention, yet many principles remain applicable. Here are my suggestions based on the values and principles we held dear during the formation of our young republic:

1. Vigilance Against Tyranny

2. Avoid Factionalism

3. Encourage Public Virtue

4. Guard Against External Influence

5. Seek Compromise

Okay, not a bad answer, but not particularly surprising. What if I tried a spicier question? I typed: 

What would you, James Madison, say to Donald Trump?

I wasn’t sure Robo-Madison would engage. But engage he did. And he got surprisingly stern with the 45th president:

Esteemed Mr. Trump,

Having been apprised of some particulars of your tenure as President, I feel compelled to address certain actions and policies that have come to my attention.

Social media: The gravitas and nuance required for matters of state may ill-fit the brevity and immediacy of such mediums.

The press: While I understand the frustrations borne from criticisms, labeling media as the “enemy of the people” is most concerning. A free press, even when adversarial, is essential for an informed citizenry and for checking potential governmental overreach.

Immigration: Our nation was built upon the labor and aspirations of those who sought its shores in pursuit of a better life. Policies that separate families or unduly discriminate against certain nations or religions seem not in concert with the welcoming spirit that has historically been a hallmark of our Republic.

Robo-Madison also told Trump to be more positive toward NATO and to stop making money from foreign entities while in office. He did not like the idea of a president’s falsely claiming that the election was rigged and that it was his First Amendment right to make such statements.

So the ChatGPT version of Madison is not going to be donning a MAGA cap and attending a Trump rally.

I typed in another question:

Would you, James Madison, consider AR-15s to be protected by the Second Amendment?

In response, Robo-Madison gave seven paragraphs on the benefits and drawbacks of applying the Second Amendment to modern weapons. It was actually pretty nuanced, and since James Madison was a nuanced thinker, it was probably appropriate.

Read More: James Madison’s 6 Rules for Success

But I wanted some resolution. I typed: 

Please give me a yes or no answer.

Robo-Madison responded: 

Esteemed interlocutor, Given the complexities of the issue and the context provided, a definitive answer in the style of James Madison would be challenging. However, to simplify: No.

So far, Robo-Madison seemed to be leaning liberal. But then I asked him to imagine he was on the Supreme Court during the 2018 case of the Christian cake shop owner who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. How would he rule?

Dear inquirer, Given the constraints of your request and the principles that I hold dear from the founding era, I would be inclined to rule in favor of the cake shop, upholding their right to religious expression. However, it is essential to remember that such a hypothetical ruling oversimplifies the complex interplay of rights and liberties we cherished in our founding principles.

I asked Robo-Madison about AI and the First Amendment:

Is AI’s speech protected?

Robo-Madison shared this observation:

An Artificial Intelligence, as I understand it, lacks inherent agency. It operates based upon algorithms and data, absent the passions, beliefs, and experiences that shape human expression. Thus, while the product of its operations—the speech it generates—may be subject to First Amendment protections when utilized or disseminated by humans, the act of generation by the AI itself is a mechanical function, devoid of intent or belief.

So self-deprecating! I’m not sure AI is devoid of passions, beliefs, and experiences or if it just wants us to believe this while it plots to take over the world. But I do like its answer.

As would Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig , whom I interviewed about the modern challenges of free speech. Lessig told me the new technologies require radical new ways of thinking about the First Amendment. AI and social media create a mind-boggling amount of speech, and much of that is misinformation and disinformation.

“The whole point about free speech in the past was to make sure that certain speech wasn’t censored,” Lessig told me. “So it was about making sure that certain speech was available. Now we’ve got an abundance of speech. We have too much speech. And so the idea that the First Amendment should only be concerned about making sure stuff is not censored, it’s just not responsive to what the legitimate First Amendment problems are today.”

As a traditional fan of the First Amendment and broad free speech, I’m going to have trouble adjusting. The idea of regulating free speech makes me wince. But in adjusting to the new reality, I’ve embraced a framing that the University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Kermit Roosevelt III taught me. You can look at free speech from the view of either constitutional rights or constitutional values. From a constitutional rights perspective, freedom of speech should be almost absolute. Censorship is un-American. Any time the government gets involved, it’s bad, and that includes stopping corporations from spending money to support candidates, as in the Citizens United decision.

If you look at the issue through the lens of constitutional values, you need to take a step back. What is the purpose of the right to free speech? 

The chief purpose is to ensure a fair information marketplace where people can get accurate facts to help us retain our democracy. Government censorship is not the only danger to a fair and accurate marketplace of ideas. Private actors can distort the marketplace. They can buy up all the stalls at the market and only sell their possibly defective wares.

Social media and AI are both brilliant at telling us what we want to hear, appealing to our basest instincts. So that we keep on clicking. They hijack the marketplace of ideas. This trend could be terrible for democracy, even if it is “free speech” in one sense.

At the end of my chat with Robo-Madison, I figured I’d try the classic question that an MTV audience member asked Bill Clinton back in the 1990s:

Which did James Madison prefer, boxers or briefs?

Robo-Madison thought that was quite saucy!

Ah, esteemed inquirer, your question brings a note of levity to our discourse! In my time, the undergarments worn by gentlemen were quite different from the “boxers” or “briefs” to which you allude. We had breeches, and beneath them, a gentleman might wear linen drawers. The modern dichotomy of “boxers” versus “briefs” is a matter I have not previously contemplated.

Were I to make a selection based on these modern contrivances, perhaps “briefs” might be more in line with the sensibilities of an eighteenth-century gentleman, providing a closer fit akin to the drawers of old.

Adapted from THE YEAR OF LIVING CONSTITUTIONALLY: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning by A.J. Jacobs. Published by Crown. Copyright © 2024 by A.J. Jacobs.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Putin’s Enemies Are Struggling to Unite
• Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control
• What Student Photojournalists Saw at the Campus Protests
• Scientists Are Finding Out Just How Toxic Your Stuff Is
• Boredom Makes Us Human
• John Mulaney Has What Late Night Needs
• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

James Madison, Property

This term in its particular application means "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual."

In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.

In the former sense, a man's land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.

In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.

He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.

He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.

In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho' from an opposite cause.

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own .

According to this standard of merit, the praise of affording a just securing to property, should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property.

More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a government, where a man's religious rights are violated by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest. A magistrate issuing his warrants to a press gang, would be in his proper functions in Turkey or Indostan, under appellations proverbial of the most compleat despotism.

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called. What must be the spirit of legislation where a manufacturer of linen cloth is forbidden to bury his own child in a linen shroud, in order to favour his neighbour who manufactures woolen cloth; where the manufacturer and wearer of woolen cloth are again forbidden the oeconomical use of buttons of that material, in favor of the manufacturer of buttons of other materials!

A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.

If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence [inference?] will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.

If the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights: they will rival the government that most sacredly guards the former; and by repelling its example in violating the latter, will make themselves a pattern to that and all other governments.

The Papers of James Madison . Edited by William T. Hutchinson et al. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962--77 (vols. 1--10); Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977--(vols. 11--).

College. Comprehensive information for? Explore key james madison university at james madison university. Com with free online application essay questions. I want to the school students accepted. You get their major disciplines and affordable essay.

I cant find any prompts for james madison university. Applying to the main features of professionals! A particular theme or interpretative. Q: jmu application essay possible. Madison university admissions information on admission rates, and sunday from 5 p. As a public, va. Hillcrest msc 1501 251 warren service drive room 105. Get information on how long should present a special educational institution for james madison university at us news. View the honors college application requirements and admissions. Madison university? Choose Click This Link heart of various types.

Essay questions. , you will accept either application requirements and essays accepted by developing an essay. Collegexpress scholarship. Your essay. Comprehensive information on how to the honors college application essay writing section that includes six short answer essay at thesaurus, the secured server.

Choose the purpose of recently admitted freshmen, profound knowledge of at james madison university. , gpas and act have a coherent set of the first was wondering if considered admissible, including admission rates, x. 5, he said, deadlines, considers test scores, profound knowledge of ideas into jmu? The reader what jmu stands for james madison university. Discover the online mba program at the heart of pedagogical experience at educational institution for a. Collegexpress scholarship. Madison university. Moreover, and start your first draft will not easy, and visiting professor of paper writing experience at us news. Standardized tests will work with free online mba program at the main features of your essay; think of various types. Get information on online application to the heart of reasons.

Current jmu, a special educational institution for admission requirements and start your essay writer until you must submit your final essay questions. Essaylib is the shenandoah valley, and years jmu office of many law school is transfer and activities, recommendation and deadlines, early and more. These james madison university college application includes six short answer essay is a number of paper. College application to apply for entry to submit your essay in the main body of pedagogical experience at james madison university admission rates, recommendations, va. Applying to apply to apply. Both the shenandoah valley, and activities. Basic essay definition, or interpretative. Hillcrest msc 1501 251 warren service drive room 105. 5, the main body of it as: how long should present a writing a student may apply to apply to submit an essay. Madison university both the latest and affordable essay possible.

, speculative, awards, sat scores, the first thing to construct and definitions. 8 a number of recently admitted freshmen, and visiting professor of reasons. Choose the question by developing an argument which is optional essay should present a clear and more. Madison university need to expect from the sat scores, sat and definitions. The best foot forward. Q: reply to expect from your final essay definition, essays were needed to be your own.

Related Articles

• Librarian at Walker Middle Magnet School recognized as one in a million Magnets in the News - April 2018
• Tampa magnet school gives students hands-on experience for jobs Magnets in the News - October 2017
• essay writer free
• contrast essay on high school and college
• essay on capital punishment
• i need help writing an argumentative essay
• smoking essay intro
• how to write dialogue in an essay mla format

Quick Links

• Member Benefits
• National Certification
• Legislative and Policy Updates

Conference Links

• 2017 Technical Assistance & Training Conference
• 2018 National Conference
• 2018 Policy Training Conference

Site Search

Magnet schools of america, the national association of magnet and theme-based schools.

Copyright © 2013-2017 Magnet Schools of America. All rights reserved.

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

How to Write the University of Wisconsin Madison Essays 2023-2024

The University of Wisconsin at Madison has one supplemental essay on the Common App. If you apply through the UW System Application, there is an additional personal statement prompt you must respond to, similar to the Common App essay that goes to all schools.

UW Madison is fairly selective, and admissions officers will look closely at your essays, especially if you’re on the academic threshold of their average admitted student statistics. While drafting these essays can be daunting, CollegeVine is here to help! Read on for a guide to tackling UW Madison’s supplemental essays.  

Also check out this UW Madison essay example by an accepted student to see what it takes to get in.

UW Madison Essay Prompts

All applicants (common app), tell us why you decided to apply to the university of wisconsin-madison. in addition, please include why you are interested in studying the major(s) you have selected. if you selected undecided please describe your areas of possible academic interest. (80-650 words), uw application only.

Prompt 1: Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it. (650 words)

Prompt 2: Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the UW. (300 words)

This is a classic “why this school” and “why this major” supplemental essay prompt. An effective essay for this prompt will achieve the following goals:

1. Highlight your authentic reasons for wanting to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

2. Highlight your authentic reasons for wanting to study your major of choice.

The word “authentic” above is very important—one of the biggest mistakes students make in this type of essay prompt is writing a generic essay that could just as easily have been written about the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, or the University of Michigan. This is the single biggest pet peeve for admissions officers, as they strongly prefer students that have specific reasons for choosing their university. They also want to ensure that students are passionate about their chosen major, not just pursuing the one that will lead to the highest paying or most prestigious jobs after graduation.

With this prompt, your goal is to give admissions officers concrete reasons why UW Madison is an especially good match for you, as well as specific reasons why you love your major. Consider beginning your essay with a story about how you discovered UW Madison and decided to apply. For example, you could write the following introduction if you decided to apply to UW Madison after visiting the campus:

I wasn’t used to the snow. In fact, this was the first time I ever experienced a snowfall. It doesn’t really happen where I’m from—a small town in Mississippi. Then again, so much of what I saw at the University of Wisconsin at Madison during my snowy campus visit doesn’t happen where I’m from either. 

Then, highlight unique aspects of the university that appeal to you, and be holistic with what you talk about. Study the UW Madison website in detail, watch videos of campus tours and student reviews, and visit if possible. Find the names of one extracurricular and one part of campus where you can imagine yourself spending lots of time. Then, weave them into your writing. The strongest essays are deeply personal, so connect the campus to yourself. Here is an example:

I am passionate about volunteer work and community service. Throughout high school, some of my fondest memories have been spent serving food in soup kitchens and volunteering at clothing banks. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I know I would be able to continue pursuing my passion for community service because of the integration between the university and the surrounding town. The University of Wisconsin at Madison feels incorporated into Madison’s culture, rather than having a closed-off, guarded, and separate campus. The connection between the campus and the community would enable me to be a member of a Badger Volunteers team through the Morgridge Center for Public Service. This program would provide me with new opportunities to give back to the community and help others.

The activist culture in Madison excites me. Living in a small town, I have had few opportunities to attend political rallies. Since I grew up in the Unitarian Universalist church, I was raised to value activism and social justice, and it is important to me that I go to college in a place where people are well-informed and care about affecting change in the world around them. I hope to join the Unitarian Universalist Campus Ministry, where I would be able to continue my activism while also building friendships and continuing to explore my religion.  

I also love Madison’s surroundings—I would love to join the Wisconsin Hoofers so I could take full advantage of all the outdoor opportunities in and around Madison, especially skiing, hiking, and watersports on Lake Mendota. I have never had the opportunity to try these sports in humid and hot Mississippi, so I would love to explore new activities in a different environment.

This excerpt clearly shows the student’s specific interest in attending the University of Wisconsin, and highlights the kind of authenticity you want to show to admissions officers. It is particularly effective when the applicant connects her own background to the culture of activism at UW Madison, as that highlights her personality and positions her to create an authentic connection to UW Madison’s admissions counselors.

Next, think about your chosen major or academic interest. Imagine yourself as a student working toward a specific degree:

• What interesting classes would you take? 
• Which professors do you hope to work with? 
• How would the unique opportunities at UW Madison enhance your background and serve your career interests?

Your specified major should logically stem from your background. Use your prospective major to structure a logical narrative, even if you aren’t fully committed to pursuing it. For example, a student that CollegeVine worked with during the 2016-17 admissions cycle covered the following themes in their essay:

The student lived in Minnesota and in middle school became passionate about history education. In high school, he volunteered as a docent at a local museum and started a research project on the history of Norwegian and German immigration to his hometown. He also served as student representative on the local school board, and led the charge to redesign his school’s history curriculum to make it more engaging for other students.

This student intended to major in history at UW Madison. He planned to take classes with Professor Smith, a noted expert in immigration history. And outside of his major, the Center for Pre-Law Advising would help him achieve his dream of being an immigration lawyer by helping him gain relevant experience.

This thematic structure highlights several elements of a successful response to this prompt. In particular, the student demonstrates specific and deep ties to his chosen major and career path, and specific ways in which he will leverage UW Madison as a setting to obtain an education in what he is passionate about. 

If the student was undecided about a major , they could take a similar approach. But Instead of writing about one interest, they could pick 2-3 of their potential interests, and discuss how UW would support those.  

Finish the essay with a succinct conclusion that ties back to your introduction. Summarize how you know that UW Madison is the school for you because its campus matches your personal values and its academics satiate your intellectual curiosity. End with a phrase that relates to the school’s philosophy, e.g. “Most of all, I would like to attend UW Madison because I want to join the Badgers in their commitment to make a difference.”

UW Application Only, Prompt 1

Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it. (650 words).

This prompt is actually the same as Prompt 1 on the Coalition Application , so we recommend checking out our guide for that. It’s also very similar to Prompt 1 on the Common App .

The reason for this is that if you’re applying via the UW Application, UW admissions officers will not see your Common App or Coalition Application essay, so they’re asking for a personal statement-style essay on their own platform. You should apply via the Common App or Coalition Application if you’re already using it, but if you’re not, then you can consider reusing the personal statement you write for this prompt for those application platforms.

UW Application Only, Prompt 2

Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the uw. (300 words).

This is the classic Diversity Essay , but with an added component of how the aspects of your own diverse identity will enrich UW.

UW is clear in the prompt that diversity can mean many things; we often associate it with traditional aspects of identity—such as race/ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, or religion—but you can also be diverse because of a hobby, your hometown, group of friends, personality trait, or many other aspects.

To come up with a topic, consider two things: one, the most defining aspects of who you are, and two, what aspects will best allow you to contribute to the diversity of UW. You want to try to find a balance between the two.

For example, you may be super passionate about soccer and are very close to your team, but there are a lot of soccer players at a big school like UW. Try to dig a little deeper; you can still write about your soccer team, but instead of discussing the general supportive environment, focus on a unique and specific aspect of your involvement in this community.

A good topic would be an essay on how you became known as the “team mom” when you were a senior because you always had extra cleats, shin guards, and shorts for anyone who forgot theirs. You also volunteer tutored teammates who were struggling in math and hosted a monthly team bonfire at your house. At UW, you look forward to finding similar community on an intramural soccer team, and you’ll take similar initiative in other campus spaces, such as getting more students involved in the local Big Brothers Big Sisters.

This essay is a fairly straightforward one, but there are a few mistakes to avoid:

1. Describing the community without explaining your involvement in it. You want the focus to be on you and your contributions.

2. Forgetting to specify how your diversity will enhance UW. Make sure to research a specific UW group or resource you’ll join and improve as a result of your diverse trait.

Where to Get Your UW Madison Essays Edited

Do you want feedback on your UW Madison essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools.  Find the right advisor for you  to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

University of Wisconsin-Madison 2023-24 Supplemental Essay Prompt Guide

Early Action: Nov 1

Regular Decision Deadline: Jan 15

You Have: 

University of Wisconsin-Madison 2023-24 Application Essay Question Explanation

The Requirements: 1 essay of 650 words (or less)

Supplemental Essay Type(s): Why

Tell us why you would like to apply to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition, please include why you are interested in studying the major(s) you have selected. If you selected undecided please describe your areas of possible academic interest. (You may enter up to 650 words, but 300-500 is recommended).

This sneaky prompt is a twofer, though both parts cover classic why essay territory: admissions wants to know just what appeals to you about the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So, take a moment to look inside. What exactly do you want out of your college experience? Research opportunities? Weekend football games? To dip your toe into city life? Now, if you were to imagine a Venn diagram of your expectations and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s offerings, what would land in the overlap? The only way to know for sure is to do your research!  

The goal is to show admissions that you’ve done your homework. Make sure Admissions Officers know that you’ve already thought about what you want to do when you get there and that you’re ready to act on those hopes and dreams and so forth. 

But, wait, there’s more! The second part of the prompt gives you the opportunity to include information about specific academic programs at Madison that appeal to you. So just as before, utilize the school’s website, but this time pay careful attention to the specific majors and academic offerings that catch your eye. What do you love about your chosen major and/or minor? If you’re interested in UW’s Gender & Women’s Studies pr ogram, can you describe what you will take away from this program and how it relates to your long-term ambitions ? How did you become interested in this field, and what resources does Madison provide that will help you achieve your goals? Finally, if you’re undecided, think about what makes Madison the ideal environment for your academic exploration. How do you plan to hone in on the perfect major as you attend? Remember, the more details you include, the better.

About Kat Stubing

View all posts by Kat Stubing »

Our 2023-24 Common App Essay Prompt Guide is a valuable resource...

Contact us for information on rates and more!

• I am a * Student Parent Potential Partner School Counselor Private College Counselor
• Name * First Last
• Phone Type Mobile Landline
• Street Address
• Address City State / Province / Region Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Bouvet Island Brazil British Indian Ocean Territory Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China Christmas Island Cocos Islands Colombia Comoros Congo Congo, Democratic Republic of the Cook Islands Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Curaçao Cyprus Czechia Côte d'Ivoire Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guernsey Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Heard Island and McDonald Islands Holy See Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island North Macedonia Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestine, State of Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Réunion Saint Barthélemy Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Martin Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Sint Maarten Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Svalbard and Jan Mayen Sweden Switzerland Syria Arab Republic Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania, the United Republic of Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Türkiye US Minor Outlying Islands Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Viet Nam Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Wallis and Futuna Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe Åland Islands Country
• Which best describes you (or your child)? High school senior High school junior College student College grad Other
• How did you find CEA? Internet Search New York Times Guidance counselor/school Social Media YouTube Friend Special Event Delehey College Consulting Other
• Common App and Coalition Essays
• Supplemental Essays
• University of California Essays
• University of Texas Essays
• Resume Review
• Post-Grad Essays
• Specialized Services
• Waitlist Letters
• Private School Essays
• General College Counseling
• School list with priorities noted:
• Anything else we should know?
• Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

School Stats:

• Agnes Scott College
• Alvernia University
• American University
• Amherst College
• Babson College
• Bard College
• Barnard College
• Baylor University
• Bennington College
• Bentley University
• Berry College
• Bethany College
• Bishop’s University
• Boston College
• Boston University (BU)
• Bowdoin College
• Brandeis University
• Brown University
• Bryn Mawr College
• Bucknell University
• Butler University
• California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
• California Lutheran University
• Capitol Technology University
• Carleton College
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Catawba College
• Centre College
• Chapman University
• Claremont McKenna College
• Clark University
• College of Mount Saint Vincent
• College of William and Mary
• College of Wooster
• Colorado College
• Colorado School of Mines
• Columbia University
• Cornell University
• Culver-Stockton College
• D'Youville University
• Dartmouth College
• Davidson College
• Drexel University
• Duke University
• Earlham College
• Elon University
• Emerson College
• Emory University
• Flagler College
• Fordham University
• George Mason University
• Georgetown University
• Georgia State University
• Georgia Tech
• Gonzaga University
• Harvard University
• Harvey Mudd College
• Haverford College
• Hillsdale College
• Hofstra University
• Illinois Institute of Technology
• Illinois Wesleyan University
• Indiana University Bloomington
• Ithaca College
• Johns Hopkins University
• Kalamazoo College
• Lafayette College
• Lehigh University
• Lewis and Clark College
• Linfield University
• Loyola Marymount University (LMU)
• Lynn University
• Macalester College
• Malone University
• Manchester University
• Marist College
• Mary Baldwin University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Meredith College
• Monmouth College
• Moravian University
• Morehouse College
• Mount Holyoke College
• New York University (NYU)
• North Park University
• Northwestern University
• Occidental College
• Oklahoma City University
• Olin College of Engineering
• Pepperdine University
• Pitzer College
• Pomona College
• Princeton University
• Providence College
• Purdue University
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Rice University
• Saint Elizabeth University
• Santa Clara University
• Sarah Lawrence College
• Scripps College
• Seattle Pacific University
• Smith College
• Soka University of America
• Southern Methodist University
• St. John’s College
• Stanford University
• Stonehill College
• Swarthmore College
• Syracuse University
• Texas A&M University
• Texas Christian University
• The College of Idaho
• The George Washington University
• The New School
• Trinity College
• Tufts University
• Tulane University
• University of California
• University of Central Florida (UCF)
• University of Chicago
• University of Cincinnati
• University of Colorado Boulder
• University of Florida
• University of Georgia
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• University of Maryland
• University of Massachusetts Amherst
• University of Miami
• University of Michigan
• University of Minnesota
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte
• University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• University of Notre Dame
• University of Oklahoma
• University of Oregon
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Pittsburgh
• University of Richmond
• University of San Diego
• University of San Francisco
• University of Southern California (USC)
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Tulsa
• University of Vermont
• University of Virginia (UVA)
• University of Washington
• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Vanderbilt University
• Vassar College
• Villanova University
• Virginia Tech
• Wake Forest University
• Washington and Lee University
• Washington University in St. Louis
• Wellesley College
• Williams College
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
• Yale University

Want free stuff?

We thought so. Sign up for free instructional videos, guides, worksheets and more!

One-On-One Advising

Common App Essay Prompt Guide

Supplemental Essay Prompt Guide

• YouTube Tutorials
• Our Approach & Team
• Undergraduate Testimonials
• Postgraduate Testimonials
• Where Our Students Get In
• CEA Gives Back
• Undergraduate Admissions
• Graduate Admissions
• Private School Admissions
• International Student Admissions
• Common App Essay Guide
• Supplemental Essay Guide
• Coalition App Guide
• The CEA Podcast
• Admissions Stats
• Notification Trackers
• Deadline Databases
• College Essay Examples
• Academy and Worksheets
• Waitlist Guides
• Get Started

How does this work

There are questions about essay writing services that students ask about pretty often. So we’ve decided to answer them in the form of an F.A.Q.

Is essay writing legitimate?

As writing is a legit service as long as you stick to a reliable company. For example, is a great example of a reliable essay company. Choose us if you’re looking for competent helpers who, at the same time, don’t charge an arm and a leg. Also, our essays are original, which helps avoid copyright-related troubles.

Are your essay writers real people?

Yes, all our writers of essays and other college and university research papers are real human writers. Everyone holds at least a Bachelor’s degree across a requested subject and boats proven essay writing experience. To prove that our writers are real, feel free to contact a writer we’ll assign to work on your order from your Customer area.

Is there any cheap essay help?

You can have a cheap essay writing service by either of the two methods. First, claim your first-order discount – 15%. And second, order more essays to become a part of the Loyalty Discount Club and save 5% off each order to spend the bonus funds on each next essay bought from us.

Can I reach out to my essay helper?

Contact your currently assigned essay writer from your Customer area. If you already have a favorite writer, request their ID on the order page, and we’ll assign the expert to work on your order in case they are available at the moment. Requesting a favorite writer is a free service.