Bøker av William E. (Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law and Professor of History Nelson

After concluding that the mid-eighteenth-century colonial legal system usually functioned effectively, this book focuses on constitutional events leading to the American Revolution, showing how lawyers used ideology in the interests of their clients and became revolutionary leaders. Ideology thus served to protect institutional structures and socio-economic interests.

This volume traces English efforts to govern the Chesapeake and New England colonies by imposing the common law. Although every colony received the common law by 1750, local interests retained significant power everywhere and used that power to preserve divergent, customary patterns of law that had arisen in the seventeenth century.

William E. Nelson's first volume of the four-volume The Common Law of Colonial America (2008) focused on how the legal systems of the Chesapeake colonies-Virginia and Maryland-contrasted with those of the New England colonies and traced these dissimilarities from the initial settlement of America until approximately 1660. In this new volume, Nelson brings the discussion forward, covering the years from 1660, which saw the Restoration of the Britishmonarchy, to 1730. In particular, he analyzes the impact that an increasingly powerful British government had on the evolution of the common law in the New World. As the reach of the Crown extended, Britain imposed far more restrictions than before on the new colonies it had chartered in the Carolinas and themiddle Atlantic region. The government's intent was to ensure that colonies' laws would align more tightly with British law. Nelson examines how the newfound coherence in British colonial policy led these new colonies to develop common law systems that corresponded more closely with one another, eliminating much of the variation that socio-economic differences had created in the earliest colonies. As this volume reveals, these trends in governance ultimately resulted in a tension betweentop-down pressures from Britain for a more uniform system of laws and bottom-up pressures from colonists to develop their own common law norms and preserve their own distinctive societies. Authoritative and deeply researched, the volumes in The Common Law of Colonial America will become the foundationalresource for anyone interested the history of American law before the Revolution.