“One of the more significant recent pieces of scholarship in this area . . . essential reading for all students of early America.” —Journal of American History
Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution—that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances—shaped the legal development of the colonial world.
Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder describes how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the place of English law in the colonies; the existence of equity courts and legislative equitable relief; property rights for women and inheritance laws; commercial law and currency reform; and laws governing religious establishment. Using as a case study the corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number of appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal culture.
“The book is rich in social history as well, with the evolving status of women and institutional religion providing much of the legal grist.” —Choice
Mary Sarah Bilder is Professor of Law, Boston College Law School.
Table of Contents
Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments A Note on Legal Terms Introduction: The Transatlantic Constitution and the Colonial World I. The Transatlantic Legal World 1. Legal Practitioners and Legal Literates 2. The Laws of England 3. The Laws of Rhode Island II. Transatlantic Legal Practice 4. The Transatlantic Appeal 5. Women, Family, Property 6. Personnel and Practices III. Visions of the Transatlantic Constitution 7. Religious Establishment and Orthodoxy 8. Commerce and Currency 9. The Transatlantic Constitution and the Nation Notes Index
What People are Saying About This
Mary Sarah Bilder has taken an old and long-unfashionable topic and successfully given it new interest, perspective, and importance. She is the first historian to explore the relationship between colonial legal culture and sources of constitutional authority within the British empire, and she does so with a fine appreciation for the negotiated, pragmatic, and changing nature of the relationship. This book is a major contribution to colonial American legal, constitutional, and imperial history and sets the standard for future study of the transatlantic constitution.
Bruce H. Mann
Mary Sarah Bilder has taken an old and long-unfashionable topic and successfully given it new interest, perspective, and importance. She is the first historian to explore the relationship between colonial legal culture and sources of constitutional authority within the British empire, and she does so with a fine appreciation for the negotiated, pragmatic, and changing nature of the relationship. This book is a major contribution to colonial American legal, constitutional, and imperial history and sets the standard for future study of the transatlantic constitution. — Bruce H. Mann, author of Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence
David Konig
The Transatlantic Constitution makes a major impact on the way we see the legacy of the colonial period and the later federal relationship that continues to affect us today. Mary Sarah Bilder presents an intensive examination of the structure and functioning of the legal relationship across the Atlantic, between the people of a colony and the legal metropolis in London. This exhaustively researched and deeply informed book recasts the way we think about how the "transatlantic relationship" affected law and authority. --(David Konig, Washington University in St. Louis)
