James Wilson, the best lawyer among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, was the principal architect of the executive branch. In the initial debate over the executive plank of the Virginia Plan on June 1, Wilson championed the controversial idea that the executive power should be vested in a single person, but forcefully rejected the idea that the powers of the President should be modeled on the prerogative powers of the English monarch. At the moment, on June 1, the delegates paid his words little attention, but later, as a member of the Committee of Detail, Wilson and the Committee carefully allocated the various royal prerogatives among Congress and the Presidency (eliminating some of them altogether), then vested the residuum in the President through the Vesting Clause.

Keep Reading James Wilson’s Contributions to the Construction of Article II