Led by CSLD Postdoctoral Fellow Signe Janoska-Bedi, CSLD-affiliated law students Brian Deisher and Bradley Morelli spent two weeks this summer as participants in Oxford University’s Quill Project, joining roughly fifty students from partner universities at Pembroke College for Constitutional Foundations, the Project’s 2026 summer program.

The program marked the 250th year of the American Founding at the college that was once home to William Blackstone. Students took eight interactive document classes in groups of about twelve, attended five plenary lectures, joined a full-cohort debate, and trained in the Quill research platform, a digital system that models how the Constitution and other foundational texts were negotiated and drafted. Each participant held a Bodleian Library reading card for the duration of the stay, and the curriculum ran from Revolutionary constitutional thought through the Convention and ratification debates to the Bill of Rights. Outside the classroom, the cohort visited Windsor Castle and the Houses of Parliament and saw Romeo and Juliet performed at Oxford Castle.

Deisher and Morelli studied under Professor Brian Murphy of Rutgers University during their time in the program. Janoska-Bedi served as a group tutor and delivered eight lectures on founding-era U.S. constitutionalism.

The Quill partnership is UW-Madison’s only Oxford summer study, and it extends the reach of the CSLD and UW Law into one of the world’s leading centers of legal and historical scholarship.