登入選單
返回Google圖書搜尋
The Common Law in Colonial America
William Edward Nelson
其他書名
The Chesapeake and New England, 1660-1750
出版Oxford University Press, 2016
ISBN01904650509780190465056
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=nNfeDAAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBookSAMPLE
註釋"The eminent legal historian William E. Nelson's magisterial four-volume The Common Law in Colonial America traces how the legal systems of Britain's thirteen North American colonies, which were initially established in response to divergent political, economic, and religious initiatives, slowly converged until it became possible by the 1770s to imagine that all thirteen participated in a common American legal order, which diverged in its details but differed far more substantially from English common law. This third volume begins where volume one ended and traces legal development in Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, and the satellite New England colonies from 1660 to the mid-eighteenth century. A main claim of the volume is that the Glorious Revolution changed England's policy toward its colonies. Prior to the revolution, Charles II and James II sought to centralize power in the English empire; the means they chose to achieve centralization was to continue governing Maryland and Virginia through the common law and to impose the common law on Massachusetts and the rest of New England. After the Glorious Revolution, William III continued the policy of imposing the common law. But William III and his Hanoverian successors were less concerned than their Stuart predecessors had been with centralizing power; their aim was to insure the hegemony of Protestantism in each colony as they assembled a Protestant coalition to defeat the efforts of the Catholic Louis XIV to establish what William III called 'universal monarchy.' Thus, although every one of Britain's North American colonies received the common law by the mid-eighteenth century, the reception assumed different forms in different colonies. Local interests retained significant power everywhere and used that power to preserve divergent, customary patterns of law that had arisen in the seventeenth century"--Unedited summary from book jacket.