September 17 is Constitution Day—the anniversary of the Framers signing the Constitution in 1787. This week’s episode dives into what happened after the Constitution was signed—when it had to be approved “we the people,” a process known as ratification—and the arguments made on behalf of the Constitution. A major collection of those arguments was The Federalist, today often referred to as The Federalist Papers, which were a collection of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay using the pen name Publius that they circulated around the country. Our guests Judge Gregory Maggs, author of the article “A Concise Guide to the Federalist Papers as a Source of the Original Meaning of the United States Constitution,” and Colleen Sheehan, professor and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Federalist, shed light on the questions: What did the Federalist papers say? What did their writers set out to do? What were their authors reading and becoming inspired by when they wrote them? How widely were they read? What was so original about their thinking? And how are they continually used today, including in opinions written by various Supreme Court justices? Jeffrey Rosen hosts.

Additional resources and transcript available in our Media Library at constitutioncenter.org/constitution.
Questions or comments about the show? Email us at podcast@constitutioncenter.org.