One of the great, unrecognized ironies in Anglo-American constitutional history is that Sir
Edward Coke, the seventeenth-century mythologist of the “ancient constitution” and the …

This paper examines several recent arguments about the role of slavery in the settling of the
New World, the viability of slavery as an economic institution in the nineteenth century, and …

Many legal scholars consider the colonial period irrelevant to the subsequent history of
American law. In 1936 Roscoe Pound defined the 'formative era'in American law as the post …

Perhaps because Willard Hurst did not publish his first book, The Growth of American Law,
until 1950, more than a decade after he entered law teaching, his readers have often found it …

The interplay between modes of speech and the demographical, geographical, social, and
political history of Britain's North American colonies of settlement influenced the linguistic …

In 1750, Archibald Kennedy condemned New York's legislators for their radical
constitutional innovation.“They take upon themselves to be the sole judges,” he stormed …

Scholars have long asked to what extent there was a distinctive Puritan jurisprudence in
seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Purita n jurisprudenceis a shorthand that refers to …

Despite the continuing “discovery of southern religious history” and the growing scholarly
fascination with southern intellectual and cultural history, historians of the South have …

As historians continue to break down colonial and revolutionary America into increasingly
smaller temporal, spatial and social units in a process which Jack P. Greene, has termed" …