The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., houses an august body, but you won’t find many of its members there in August. Nobody minds much, because even when the court is not in session and the building not in use, the idea of the Supreme Court survives. It survives not because of the words etched in stone on the building’s façade, but because the words of the U.S. Constitution are etched in the hearts of the citizens of the American republic. It is therefore appropriate that both the building and members of the court should combine resources to celebrate the document that makes their existence matter.

On September 20, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court opened its doors to welcome friends of the Constitutional Sources Project (“ConSource”), which proudly commemorated the Constitution Day launch of its “beta” web site tool containing its first two complete collections: Madison’s Notes of the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers. The Celebration was hosted by Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia, demonstrating the level of support for and the breadth of the appeal of the Project. Kirton & McConkie has been a proud sponsor of the ConSource Project, and attorneys Paul K. Savage and Kevin Cunningham represented the firm at the event.

The Constitutional Sources Project, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization, is creating the first comprehensive online repository of the original source documents related to the Constitution. This research tool will assist interested citizens, students, teachers, public servants, lawyers and judges in discovering more about the Constitution. Having free and complete access to the original sources allows the public to visualize the thought processes behind the Constitution in the Convention of 1787 and beyond. This research tool also helps to “democratize” the Constitution by creating an Open Peer Review research tool, accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Individual users can create a customized interface for the ConSource website, complete with individual notes, cross references and annotations. It also allows users to share their views of the Constitution through “clause association” blogs and chat rooms. In other words, ConSource is democratizing the Constitution by bringing source documents to life and providing a platform for enhancing dialogue. The ConSource website provides both high-resolution images of original manuscripts plus searchable transcriptions of those documents. Source materials are indexed and linked by subject matter, with a taxonomy centered on the key phrases of the Constitution. Quick reference tools and tutorials aid research.

In presenting the original source materials for the Constitution to the world, ConSource will be making one of the most valuable and unique contributions to the study of the Constitution that has ever been undertaken. The Project promises to reproduce an entire body of expression and form, ranging from circulars, leaflets, and newspapers, to diaries, letters, personal essays and books, all expounding on themes of permanent and universal interest. The Project will capture, in many regards, the very essence of the colonial age, including (directly or indirectly) the brightest minds of the Age of Enlightenment and beyond, with expositions of human thought, philosophy and culture harking back to ideas as old as mankind. Yet these ideas are given relevance to the modern mind, because they become distilled into an infrastructure for the governance of a country, the influence of which extends to every corner of the globe.

Through ConSource’s democratization of these documents, and the ideas embodied in them, citizens of the world will no longer be dependent upon “scholarly” digests or summaries. The thoughts will not be separated from the minds that expressed them, nor will the contexts for compromises be washed away by the costs of ink and paper. Students of the Constitution, history, language, culture and political science will have free and open access to a complete, warts-and-all look at this most pivotal age. Out of this is expected to grow gradually a reinvigorated citizenship at home and a diffusion of knowledge and ideas abroad to assist students and citizens of other countries and cultures as they determine for themselves how they wish to be governed. In this respect, ConSource fulfills some of the most powerful promises of the internet and the world wide web, connecting the present with the unfiltered past, while also providing a platform for peer to peer connectivity and communication.

For more information about ConSource, visit http://www.consource.org or contact Paul Savage at psavage@kmclaw.com .