Quill Project and Utah Valley University (UVU) launch model of the 1895 Uath State Consitutional Convention

April 2019

On 11 April at the UVU campus in Orem, Quill, alongside its strategic partner at UVU, the Center for Constitutional Studies (CCS), launched its model of the 1895 Utah State Constitutional Convention. Dr Nicholas Cole, Director of the Quill Project, spoke at the event which has highlighted the project’s contribution to the study of constitutionalism. For the last year and a half, under the oversight of Quill, CCS students have worked with digital records from the Utah State Archives. Their work has shed new light on the relationship between state constitutions and the Federal union, while also demonstrating that the negotiation of state-level constitutional law was often a much more complicated affair than the creation of the Federal government. The records of the1895 Utah State Constitutional Convention have now been fully digitized and made available to the public for the first time. This is Quill’s first state constitution project, following the publication of its flagship project on the 1787 Convention. It has served to highlight the importance of this often-neglected area of US constitutional history.