Law notes found among Thomas Jefferson’s papers at the Library of Congress were recently identified as belonging to James Madison instead. Boston College Law Professor Mary Sarah Bilder made the discovery and has written about the notes in an article published in the Law and History Review.
The 39 pages of notes, long thought to be Jefferson’s, cover a wide range of legal topics, including criminal law, contracts, property, commercial law, and torts. They are significant because Madison, unlike the other Founding Fathers, was previously thought to have had little interest in the law.
You can read more here; the full text of the article is available here.
