The Common Law in Colonial America by William E. NelsonCall Number: KF361 .N455 2008
This comparative legal history treatise challenges the traditional focus on searching for a unifying transmission and reception of the English common law in colonial America in order to explain how a truly American legal culture had developed by the time of the Founding era. Through extensive research into archival legal records and existing historical scholarship, Prof. Nelson demonstrates that the legal cultures of the early American colonies were more characterized by divergence and dissimilarities than by any uniform reliance on English common law. Seen from this perspective the origin story of a common American legal culture is a dynamic one of tension between imperial British efforts to transmit the uniformity of England’s common law and colonial desires to maintain their distinct legal cultures and social norms. Volume 1: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607-1660 and Volume 2: The Middle Colonies and the Carolinas, 1660-1730 comprise a promising start to this project.