BOOK: William E. NELSON, E Pluribus Unum: How the Common Law Helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607-1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ISBN 9780190880804, $34.95

(Source: OUP)

Oxford University Press has published a book on the common law in pre-revolutionary America.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The colonies that comprised pre-revolutionary America had thirteen legal systems and governments. Given their diversity, how did they evolve into a single nation? In E Pluribus Unum, the eminent legal historian William E. Nelson explains how this diverse array of legal orders gradually converged over time, laying the groundwork for the founding of the United States.

From their inception, the colonies exercised a range of approaches to the law. For instance, while New England based its legal system around the word of God, Maryland followed the common law tradition, and New York adhered to Dutch law. Over time, though, the British crown standardized legal procedure in an effort to more uniformly and efficiently exert control over the Empire. But, while the common law emerged as the dominant system across the colonies, its effects were far from what English rulers had envisioned.

E Pluribus Unum highlights the political context in which the common law developed and how it influenced the United States Constitution. In practice, the triumph of the common law over competing approaches gave lawyers more authority than governing officials. By the end of the eighteenth century, many colonial legal professionals began to espouse constitutional ideology that would mature into the doctrine of judicial review. In turn, laypeople came to accept constitutional doctrine by the time of independence in 1776.

Ultimately, Nelson shows that the colonies' gradual embrace of the common law was instrumental to the establishment of the United States. Not simply a masterful legal history of colonial America, Nelson's magnum opus fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the sources of both the American Revolution and the Founding.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William E. Nelson is Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law, New York University. 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. He has been writing and teaching in the field of American legal history for nearly fifty years and is the author of many books, including four volumes of The Common Law in Colonial America (Oxford), The Roots of American Bureaucracy, Americanization of the Common Law, and The Fourteenth Amendment.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Initial Settlements, 1607-1660

Chapter 1: The Chesapeake

Chapter 2: New England

Chapter 3: New Netherland

Part Two: The Forging of Empire, 1660-1750

Chapter 4: The Crown's Imposition of the Common Law and Colonial Resistance

Chapter 5: The End of Resistance and the Triumph of the Common Law

Chapter 6: Ready Acceptance of the Common Law: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the South

Chapter 7: The Emergence of the Legal Profession

Chapter 8: Property, Commercial Law, Labor Law, and Slavery

Part Three: Altering Empire to Defeat France, 1689-1750

Chapter 9: The Local Structure of Power

Chapter 10: The Law of Religion

Chapter 11: Criminal and Regulatory Law

Part Four: The Collapse of Empire, 1750-1776

Chapter 12: The Well-Functioning Empire of the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Chapter 13: Weakening the Bonds of Empire

Chapter 14: Testing the Bonds of Empire

Chapter 15: Severing the Ties of Empire

Chapter 16: An Historian's Postscript

Bibliography

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