Civil law's influence on early United States law
It is a law-school maxim today that the United States is a common-law country, while most of Europe uses civil law: English-derived common law has as its most basic tenet the binding nature of judicial precedent, while Roman-derived civil law privileges statutes. But the more I investigate the history and details of each, the more clear it becomes to me that the United States, at least, owes (almost?) as much of its legal system to civil law as it does to “pure” common law.
Common law originalism: the common law was not so common
One reason to examine the reception of English common law in the American colonies is the reliance by modern originalists (like Antonin Scalia) on the generalized understandings of what the Constitution meant in light of its common-law context. But finding that stability may not be as easy as it might seem, at least in part because jurists of the time were, in many ways, as sophisticated as we are today in arguing with, against, and around precedent – which itself was hardly either stable or fixed.
Robert Horwitz on the deregulation of American telecommunications
Robert Horwitz’s The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications, published in 1989, explores in depth the issue of telecommunications regulation at a time when telecommunications was once again in transition.
National identity through postal delivery of newspapers
In Spreading the News, Richard R. John writes about the development of the American postal system in the eighteenth century, and the police choices that leverages the system as a means of newspaper distribution.
Civil law's influence on American common law: the appeal
In “Salamanders and Sons of God,” an article in The Many Legalities of Early America, Mary Sarah Bilder writes about the “Culture of Appeal in Early New England,” and situates the embrace of the right to appeal by New Englanders within the larger English and Roman legal tradition.
On the legal basis for English possession of North America
James Muldoon’s article in The Many Legalities of Early America, “Discovery, Grant, Charter, Conquest or Purchase,” discusses the surprising influence the Pope’s validation of Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the New World played in English justifications for their own American territory. But this justification was merged with an English focus on improvements to the land.
Colonial Law in Early America
In The Common Law in Colonial America: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607 – 1660, William Edward Nelson writes about three main colonial legal traditions: Virginia, New England, and Maryland. These three centers drew to various degrees from English common law, but deviated from it in a number of important respects and for reasons related to their establishments and purposes.
Early lawyering in colonial America
In the seventeenth century, according to Kermit Hall and Peter Karsten, “there were few lawyers and their status was problematic.”
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