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Interesting research on the Constitutional Convention

The "received wisdom" is that the US Constitution resulted from the decision of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention to exceed their authority, which only extended to proposing amendments to the Articles of Confederation, and instead draft an entirely new charter.

Michael' Farris challenges this with his DEFYING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: THE CONSTITUTION WAS NOT THE PRODUCT OF A RUNAWAY CONVENTION, in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

He demonstrates that the Framers saw the state calls for a convention as the critical events, and not the Continental Congress' subsequent resolution calling for it. Only a few of the state calls limited delegates to proposing amendments, and even those states ratified the ultimate result. Claims that the delegates had exceeded their authority were only rarely made, when such claims would have been useful to antifederalist writers. The antifederalists would have been the first to assert that the relevant calls for a convention would have been the ones made by the states (which antifederalists felt had the ultimate power) and not that made by the Continental Congress.