Jesse Wegman ’96 was once a typical student at Wesleyan University, majoring in psychology and completing his senior thesis. Nowadays, he is a contributing writer for The New York Times (NYT) and works on the front lines of Supreme Court reform as a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.
This week, The Argus sat down with Wegman and discussed many topics, including his fond memories of Wesleyan, his path as a journalist, and his upcoming book, “The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution,” which will be released in June 2026.
“It was really one of the highlights of my life to be [at Wesleyan], and it really was just the perfect environment for me,” Wegman said. “I was a psychology major, not a journalist, nor did I have anything to do with The Argus, which I’m still sad about because it would have been great training. I did work on a thesis, which definitely helped me think about how to tell a story, how to research, and how to write.”
After graduating from Wesleyan, Wegman pursued a career in journalism, interning at The Atlantic Monthly and later working at National Public Radio (NPR) as an assistant producer and reporter. He went on to attend New York University School of Law, graduating in 2005.
Following stints at newsrooms including Thomson Reuters and The Daily Beast, Wegman joined The NYT Editorial Board in 2013 and covered the Supreme Court until 2025.
“The Times hired me because of my legal and journalistic background,” Wegman said. “For the first several years on the board, I was going to Washington and writing about the Supreme Court: oral arguments, the opinions, the cases that they denied. And then when Trump ran in 2015 and was elected in 2016, that changed a lot of people’s beats. Suddenly, I had to adapt my coverage to be much more focused on issues that Trump’s candidacy and presidency brought to the fore, like rule of law, democracy, [and] elections.”
Wegman also gave The Argus a preview of his upcoming book, “The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution,” which will be the first biography of Wilson written for a general or popular audience.
Wegman first discovered his interest in Wilson in 2020 when writing his first book, “Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.”
“I was reading the notes of the Constitutional Convention, where they wrote the Constitution, and I kept running into this sort of long-winded Scottish immigrant,” Wegman said. “I found him so interesting because he talked in a way that sounded like [how] we talk today about democracy: the importance of direct access to government, that people are equal before the law and equal in political representation. It turns out that not only did I not know about him, but that he was really one of the central players in both the Declaration and the writing of the Constitution, and then a member of the first Supreme Court.”
One anecdote explored in Wegman’s upcoming book is the Fort Wilson Riot, a conflict in which Wilson’s home in Philadelphia was attacked by an angry mob in 1779.
“[Wilson’s] social world was made up of the political and business elites, and he did a bunch of things…which created a public suspicion of him,” Wegman said. “I think it was a misunderstanding of what he was actually trying to do, but he got on the bad side of a lot of the radical revolutionaries who saw him as a Tory sympathizer. There was a mob that gathered and decided to go after the elites of Philadelphia, and they had him on their list. Wilson barricaded himself in his house with about two dozen of his allies, and very quickly, fighting started. There were guns fired in both directions. They knocked down his front door. They dragged people out, but he escaped by the skin of his teeth.”
Wegman found it fascinating that the Fort Wilson attack did not impact Wilson’s strong support for popular democracy.
“Wilson was shocked by this attack, but what I think made me so drawn to him was that it did not seem in any way to dampen his enthusiasm for popular rule,” Wegman said. “I thought, if somebody says, ‘I think the people should have the power,’ and then they get attacked, they get all Josh Hawley, right? They sound all populist when the sun is shining, but as soon as the mob turns, they start running. Wilson was not that way. Wilson comes to the constitutional conventions eight years later as a delegate from Pennsylvania, and he doubles down. He said popular sovereignty is the right way to run a government: to have people in charge.”
While on the Supreme Court, Wilson was an influential Justice.
“He actually preceded Chief Justice John Marshall in many ways,” Wegman said. “Marshall wrote Marbury v. Madison in 1803, which, we understand, established the principle of judicial review. Wilson said that ten years before Marshall did. He was sitting at the time in a circuit court capacity…and [his opinion] was not a formal written opinion, but he very clearly lays out that the Court absolutely has the power of [judicial review]. And part of the thesis of my book is that in some ways, we still haven’t caught up to Wilson and the ideals that he promoted 250 years ago.”
Wegman also spoke about Wilson’s eventual downfall. On the verge of impeachment, Wilson ended up fleeing from debt collectors and hiding in coastal North Carolina.
“Wilson was a speculator in lands, the way that many of the founders were,” Wegman said. “By the end of his life, he owned or claimed title to four million acres, roughly, which is the size of Connecticut. Wilson had a particularly reckless and almost addictive approach to land speculation. He thought he was going to flip this land for profit, but when the circumstances did not create that kind of a real estate environment, he ended up with massive debt, and he went bankrupt.”
Wilson’s land speculation put him in a strenuous legal position.
“Throughout the 1790s, [Wilson] was doing all kinds of extremely ethically dubious things as a justice of the Supreme Court, making arguments to Congress about how they should handle land legislation that would benefit him,” Wegman said. “He was thrown in debtors’ prison in Philadelphia in 1796. He then got thrown in debtors’ prison in New Jersey in 1797. He is the first and only Supreme Court Justice ever to go to jail. Finally, his son, Bird, bails him out in New Jersey, and Wilson goes down to North Carolina. He goes into hiding, spends the last year of his life there, slowly falling apart.”
In addition to his writing, Wegman works at the Brennan Center for Justice as a senior fellow. He joined earlier this year and is focused on Supreme Court reform, especially around the Court’s interim or shadow docket.
“We all know, the Court has no guns, it has no money,” Wegman said. “It only has the public’s trust and the legitimacy conferred upon it by the people who believe that it is operating in a fair and neutral manner. Right now, a historically low percentage of Americans feel that way. I am working with the Brennan Center on how to reform the Court through mechanisms like term limits, ethics reform, and other efforts to make the Court a more democratically responsive institution.”
Wegman’s career in law and journalism reflects the longstanding impact of Wesleyan alumni on the world. With “The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution,” Wegman aims to revive the story of one of our nation’s most important figures ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States.
Blake Fox can be reached at bfox@wesleyan.edu.
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