A Course of Lectures on the Constitutional Jurisprudence of the.

Duer, William Alexander, [1780-1858]. A Course of Lectures on the Constitutional Jurisprudence of the United States; Delivered Annually in Columbia College, New York. New York: Harper & Brothers, Pub., 1858. xviii, 419 pp. Contemporary brown pebbled cloth with gilt stamped spine. Worn and soiled, with bumped corners. Ex-library with ink shelf location label to foot of spine. Bookplate of Joseph M. Gleason to front pastedown. Number stamp to verso title page, otherwise internally clean. A good copy. $450 * William Alexander Duer [1780-1858], a judge of the New York Supreme Court who served as president of Columbia College from 1829 until his retirement in 1842, presented this course of lectures to seniors at Columbia after his retirement. Originally written as The Outlines of the Constitutional Jurisprudence of the United States and proposed as a textbook to prominent universities, the work gained the attention of James Madison and John Marshall, among others. The work was published under the title Lectures on Constitutional Jurisprudence in 1843, and revised in 1856, this the final authorial edition. "Herein Duer still finds ultimate sovereignty in the people. His statement is that if the people of the United States had never before acquired a common character, they assumed it when they ratified the Constitution in conventions." See Bauer, Commentaries on the Constitution 227, Dictionary of American Biography III:488. The front pastedown bears the bookplate of the distinguished historian and bibliophile Joseph M. Gleason (1869-1942). Gleason was a prominent Catholic priest, historian, and educator in California who amassed a significant library of over 100,000 volumes. His personal bookplate is notable for its pictorial design-depicting an elderly priest at a desk with a globe-and the motto "Tamdiu discendum est quamdiu vivas" (We should learn as long as we may live).…