Making Rules  14a. State Constitutions  James Wilson James
Wilson signed the Declaration of Independence and was the
Advocate General for France in America from 1779 to 1783.  The
states now faced serious and complicated questions about how to
make their rules. What did it mean to replace royal authority
with institutions based on popular rule? How was "popular
sovereignty" (the idea that the people were the highest
authority) to be institutionalized in the new state governments?
For that matter, who were "the people"?  Every state chose to
answer these questions in different ways based on distinctive
local experiences, but in most cases colonial traditions were
continued, but modified, so that the governor (the executive)
lost significant power, while the assemblies (the legislative
branch, which represented the people most directly) became much
more important. We'll focus on the new rules created in three
states to suggest the range of answers to the question about how
to organize republican governments bas