(Source: Oxford University Press)
Oxford
University Press has just published the 4th and final volume of the “The
Common Law in Colonial America” by William E. Nelson.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The eminent
legal historian William E. Nelson's magisterial four-volume The Common Law in
Colonial America traces how the many legal orders of Britain's thirteen North
American colonies gradually evolved into one American system. Initially
established on divergent political, economic, and religious grounds, the
various colonial systems slowly converged until it became possible by the 1770s
to imagine that all thirteen participated in a common American legal order,
which diverged in its details but differed far more substantially from English
common law.
This fourth and
final volume begins where volume three ended. It focuses on the laws of the
thirteen colonies in the mid-eighteenth century and on constitutional events
leading up to the American Revolution. Nelson first examines procedural and
substantive law and looks at important shifts in the law to show how the
mid-eighteenth- century colonial legal system in large part functioned
effectively in the interests both of Great Britain and of its thirteen
colonies.
Nelson then
turns to constitutional events leading to the Revolution. Here he shows how
lawyers deployed ideological arguments not for their own sake, but in order to
protect colonial institutional structures and the socio-economic interests of
their clients. As lawyers deployed the arguments, they developed them into a
constitutional theory that gave primacy to common-law constitutional rights and
local self-government. In the process, the lawyers became leaders of the
revolutionary movement and a dominant political force in the new United States.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William E.
Nelson has been writing and teaching in the field of American legal history for
nearly 50 years. He is the author of twelve monographs and editor of three
other books. In 1961 he founded the Legal History Colloquium at NYU Law School,
where nearly 100 younger scholars have held fellowships and received
post-graduate training, and has presided over the Colloquium since that time.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1:
Common Law Constitutionalism
Chapter 2: Localist
Constitutionalism
Chapter 3:
Uncontested Legal Practices
Chapter 4: The
Well-Functioning Empire of the Mid-Eighteenth Century
Chapter 5:
Government Failure in Two Colonies
Chapter 6:
Weakening the Bonds of Empire
Chapter 7:
Testing the Bonds of Empire
Chapter 8:
Terminating the Ties of Empire
Chapter 9:
Conclusion: Legal and Constitutional Legacies
More information
with the
publisher
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