There was a lot happening in Philadelphia in 1776. As Americans, we learn from an early age about the Continental Congress meeting at the Pennsylvania Statehouse — what we now know as Independence Hall — to draft and sign the Declaration of Independence. This led Benjamin Franklin to quip, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Less well known, however, is what was happening in Philadelphia just two weeks before that Declaration was signed. Down the street at Carpenters’ Hall, the Pennsylvania Provincial Conference declared Pennsylvania’s own independence and planned a convention to draft the commonwealth’s first Constitution, which was adopted in September 1776.
That first founding document of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, authored by Franklin and others, was radical for its time. It expanded voting rights, including men who paid taxes but did not own property, an idea that seems antiquated today but was progressive in that era. It included a declaration of rights; with freedom of speech and religion, it was a prototype for what would later become the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. It emphasized governance by the people, establishing a unicameral legislature with members elected to one term and an executive council, rather than a single person as executive. These innovations were intended to promote rule by the people and avoid the establishment of an aristocracy.
So what does that mean for us in 2026? This is more than just history. Pennsylvania’s Constitution is as relevant as ever and impacts the daily lives of everyone in the commonwealth, even as it’s been rewritten multiple times in 250 years. That’s why my organization, the Public Interest Law Center, has joined with Carpenters’ Hall and others in a yearlong celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Pennsylvania Provincial Conference and the Pennsylvania Constitution, including a town hall panel discussion featuring three justices of the state Supreme Court at 4 p.m. April 29 in the Pittsburgh City-County Building.
The federal Constitution provides a floor for the rights of the people, not a ceiling. State constitutions can go further, and Pennsylvania’s guiding document does exactly that.
The U.S. Constitution doesn’t include language guaranteeing a right to free elections or to a public education or to clean air and water. But the Pennsylvania Constitution does. As it has evolved over two centuries, the commonwealth’s governing document guarantees a thriving democracy and the right to some of the basic needs of the people of Pennsylvania.
To protect democracy, the Pennsylvania Constitution ensures “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” With this straightforward language, in cases brought by the Public Interest Law Center and our co-counsel, Pennsylvania’s courts have overturned a wildly gerrymandered congressional map that provided unequal representation, required election officials to count the provisional ballots of people who made a paperwork mistake on their mail ballots, and stopped a restrictive voter ID law that would have kept hundreds of thousands of eligible Pennsylvania voters from being able to cast a ballot at all.
The Pennsylvania Constitution requires “the General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.” Based on this clause, in another case brought by the Public Interest Law Center and our co-counsel, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court allowed a challenge to the commonwealth’s system for funding public schools, which led to a Commonwealth Court ruling the Legislature was not meeting its constitutional obligation. To comply with this ruling, the General Assembly has appropriated over a billion dollars in additional funding for public schools throughout Pennsylvania, though still far short of the $4.5 billion total adequacy gap.
Our state Constitution also has an Environmental Rights Amendment providing that “the people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come.”
You probably get the point. Without these state constitutional guarantees, which are absent from the U.S. Constitution, our quality of life and the vibrancy of our democracy in Pennsylvania would be seriously diminished.
We have much work to do. And the founders of our commonwealth and country were not perfect. But the Pennsylvania Constitution provides a foundation for the kind of commonwealth we can and should have.
Brent Landau is executive director of the Public Interest Law Center. Information about the April 29 town hall at the City-County Building in Pittsburgh is available at carpentershall.org/events/view/pa-provincial-conference-pittsburgh-town-hall.