The Charter and Statutes of Lafayette College

The Charter, an act of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania legislature, is the legal instrument by which Lafayette College was incorporated in 1826—a document that today would be called “articles of incorporation.” Between 1832 and 1999, the Charter was amended seven times.

The Statutes are the College’s (that is, the Board of Trustees’) corporate bylaws; the Statutes have been amended 17 times since 1971, when they were completely “recodified.”

These two documents have been traditionally published in a single booklet, Charter of Lafayette College and Amendments Thereto; Statutes of Lafayette College as Amended, last issued in June 2007. The June 2007 text is reproduced here from an electronic file provided by the President of the College.

The electronic text, a PDF, has a hypertext table of contents (“bookmarks”) and can be searched (click on the binoculars icon).

Read the Charter and Statutes.