Governance Lessons From the Constitutional Convention

[Editor’s note: Happy Fourth of July! I’m attending a wedding today, so this episode is from the vault, in a way, although it’s its first time on Statecraft. I originally published this essay in January of 2022 on Mirror, a Web3 publishing platform. There’s a reason for that platform choice: I was writing shortly after my wife had joined the core team of a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, that was attempting to acquire a first-edition copy of the US Constitution. I had been reading a history of the constitutional convention, and it seemed fitting to write about it on a thematic site. Also, yes, July 4th is about the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. Cut me some slack, please.] Last month, my wife became very involved in ConstitutionDAO, a DAO that tried to buy a first edition of the United States Constitution (good write-ups of the whole affair here1 and here). As a result, I got to watch both the public side of that process as well as some of the behind-

[Editor’s note: Happy Fourth of July! I’m attending a wedding today, so this episode is from the vault, in a way, although it’s its first time on Statecraft. I originally published this essay in January of 2022 on Mirror, a Web3 publishing platform. There’s a reason for that platform choice: I was writing shortly after my wife had joined the core team of a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, that was attempting to acquire a first-edition copy of the US Constitution. I had been reading a history of the constitutional convention, and it seemed fitting to write about it on a thematic s