Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Title

The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire

Document Type

Article

Comments

Excerpt from "Introduction: The Transatlantic Constitution and the Colonial World" in The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire, by Mary Sarah Bilder, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. This material has been posted electronically by special arrangement with the publisher.

Abstract

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.

Note: This abstract refers to the book The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire, by Mary Sarah Bilder. Available at this site for downloading is a brief excerpt from "Introduction: The Transatlantic Constitution and the Colonial World," pp.1-3, 10-11. It is included here with permission of the copyright holder.

Date of Authorship for this Version

March 2005

Keywords

american legal history, constitution, federalism, judicial review, Rhode Island, repugnancy, colonial law, transatlantic constitution, colonial appeals