Samuelson – Blackstone and the Causes of the American Revolution
Richard A. Samuelson
University of Virginia
The Philadelphia Society
Williamsburg Meeting
November 23, 1996
(Permission to quote this speech must be granted
by the Author)
"Blackstone and the Causes of the American
Revolution"
William Blackstone (1723-1780), the first Vinerian professor of
law at Oxford, did not cause the American Revolution all by
himself. Had he not published his Commentaries on the Laws
of England in the late 1760s, the American Revolution would
have taken place. Blackstone did, however, represent certain
trends in the law and in British society that, when combined with
the evolving colonial situation of the 1760s yielded American
independence. . Unrest in the empire took place at the junction
of politics, culture, and ideas as Anglo-American nationalism,
the transition to constitutional positivism, and the desire to
reform colonial administration in the 1760s rendered the empire
unworkable. After the Seven Years War, Blackstone’s doctrines
made it difficult to finesse the tension that had always existed
between the liberties of the colonial periphery and governance
from the imperial center.1
In recent years legal scholars such as John Philip Reid have
resurrected the constitutional discourse of the second half of the
eighteenth century.2 In particular, they have demonstrated that
the American colonists had a strong constitutional case against
the imperial reformers in London. This essay will build upon
that scholarship by exploring some of the underlying causes and
implications of the constitutional controversy leading to
American independence. It will build upon the insight that
America and Great Britain were divided by a common discourse
to explore how a common sense of nationality, patriotism, and
of higher purpose yielded division rather than consensus.
Nationalism waxed in the eighteenth-century British world. After
the Act of Union of 1707 that brought England, Scotland, and
Wales into a single kingdom, His Majesty’s subjects began to
think of themselves as Britons. The outgrowth of more than a
century and a half of fighting Catholics both at home and
abroad, Britons drew strength from the idea that their nation had
a role to play in providence for the liberation of the world from
both political and ecclesiastical tyranny. James Thomson gave
this idea perhaps its best known expression in his play Alfred:
When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves."3
Britons, as Linda Colley points out, regarded their nation as a
new Israel, at the right hand of God, doing His work in the
world.4 The divine mission of the British people had an earthly
dimension which glorified the rights of Englishmen that were
enshrined in the British Constitution, and secured to Britons by
the King in Parliament.
Anglo-Americans shared in that movement. According to
Colley, the residents of Great Britain were torn between two
conceptions of the colonists: "Americans as colonists
subordinate to the mother country, [and] Americans as
Englishmen abroad and consequently the brethren of those at
home."5 Anglo-Americans instinctively accepted the latter
interpretation, and believed that they shared in Britain’s destiny.
The sermons heard in America upon the success of British
Arms in Canada in 1759, the death of George II, and the
coronation of George III in 1760 all drew upon and reinforced
Anglo-American love and reverence for their mother country.
Eliphalet Williams echoed the general sentiment, when he told
the assembled Anglo-Americans in East Hartford that they
should thank the Lord for helping Britons to drive the Catholic
French out of Canada. The Lord had, he said, "so far humbled
the French and made his Protestant People, especially his
English Israel, to triumph in his Goodness."6 Tributes to the
monarch extol the defender of the protestant cause and the
British Constitution. Samuel Davies, President of the College of
New Jersey, best summarized Anglo-American sentiment:
Can the British Annals, in the Compass of the Seventeen
Hundred Years, produce a Period more favourable to Liberty,
Peace, Prosperity, Commerce and Religion? . . .George the
Great but Un-ambitious, consulted the Rights of the People, as
well as of the Crown; and claimed no Powers but such as were
granted to Him by the Constitution: . . His Parliament were his
faithful Counsellors; to whom He communicated His Measures.
. . How different would have been our Situation under the
baleful Influence of the ill boding Name of Stuart.7
Or, as John Adams wrote in 1766, "the difference between the
british Constitution and other Constitutions of Government,
vizt. that Liberty is its End."8 Such tributes abounded a mere
fifteen years before Americans welcomed Thomas Paine’s
critique of the "Royal Brute of Britain," and call for
independence.
Blackstone wrote in that context of rising nationalism on both
sides of the Atlantic. A votary of the British Constitution, his
Commentaries were a summa to help lawyers more easily digest
and, therefore, protect it. In his eyes, he merely described the
constitutional system that grew out of the revolutionary
settlement of 1688 in which the King in Parliament held the
sovereign power. "There is and must be," he wrote, "in all of
them [states] a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled
authority in which the jura summi imperii, or the rights of
sovereignty reside. . . . By sovereign power, as was before
observed is meant the making of laws."9 It was simple logic.
Law was "that rule of action, which is prescribed by some
superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey,"10 and the
sovereign power was that which made the laws. The greatness
of the British Constitution, he thought, was the balance it
achieved among monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in law
making by locating sovereignty in the King, Lords, and
Commons of the realm. That balance guaranteed liberty under
law, and made Great Britain the freest and strongest nation of its
age–as the Seven Years War proved. According to
Blackstone’s line of thought, Parliamentary sovereignty, and its
consequent right to promulgate 1688’s Declaration of Rights,
was the heart of England’s revolutionary heritage, and of her role
in providence.
By 1763, Blackstone’s Britain was on the march, master of a
greatly expanded empire in North America, and many thinkers in
London began to contemplate how the government ought to
bring that empire into the legal and constitutional framework of
the Kingdom and derive revenue from it. In the 1760s the term
"British Empire" first began to refer to the British polities on
both sides of the Atlantic.11 That linguistic turn suggests that
the British polities in America had functioned for nearly a
century and a half, greatly benefiting all concerned, without
much serious attention given to explaining the true, rightful
nature of the relations between the imperial periphery and the
imperial center. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the
empire functioned so well for so long precisely because no one
had bothered to try to establish a clear relationship between
mother country and colony.12 With Royal, Charter, and
Proprietary colonies, and now formerly French Canada and a
plethora of islands, Parliament feared that its dearly bought
empire would rapidly disintegrate unless they brought a clean
line of command to its administration. The desire to generate
revenue to cover the debt amassed in the late war brought
immediacy to efforts at reform. Governor of Massachusetts
Francis Bernard, wrote to his superiors in 1764, "we cannot but
be concerned for the stability of a fabric built on so disjointed
foundations, and raised to so great a height; and must be
convinced that it will require much political skill to secure its
duration."13 If Britain failed to hold its new empire together,
Parliament feared, Canada could be lost, and the Scarlet Whore
of Babylon would again threaten North America.
Blackstonianism made a workable solution difficult to achieve.
If Parliament’s will was law, and if Parliament legitimately had
dominion over Anglo-America, then Americans had no
sustainable rights. Reid has demonstrated at length that many
Britons, even members of Parliament, came to accept
Blackstone’s constitutional point of view only gradually in the
last part of the 18th century.14 But when Parliament considered
its role in America, rather than at home, few of its members
resisted the implications of constitutional positivism. Out of
sight, meant out of constitutional mind. As a result, Parliament
unwittingly threatened the freedoms which undergirded
Anglo-American love for the mother country. Charles Andrews
points out that, "no one in Great Britain wished to oppress the
colonies and it is to be doubted if anyone in office thought that
he was really doing so. Grenville had no other desire than to
shape his measures so as to affront them as little as possible."15
When Parliament passed a tax on British-America, it thought it
did nothing extraordinary. J.C.D. Clark points out that the
"evolving British (or English) national identity in the 1750s and
1760s had not compelled Englishmen to define Americans as
‘the other’; nor did Americans so define Britons."16 Because
Americans were Britons, then the constitutional means of taxing
them was to do it through Parliament. Blackstonians did not
believe that a tax passed by Parliament on Britons could
possibly be oppressive. It was not the belief that the colonists
were an ‘other,’ but rather the idea that they were England’s
brethren that combined with Blackstone’s constitutionalism to
lead Parliament to tax unrepresented colonists and think nothing
of it.17
Americans drew upon a different understanding of the British
Constitution. Although Blackstone drew strength from his
position as a Whig legal theorist, consolidating the gains of
1688, he also represented a revolution in constitutional thought.
In the seventeenth century, Edward Coke, the great jurist and
parliamentarian, defined and defended the liberties of Britons as
something beyond the actions of the King and Parliament. In his
way of thinking, Magna Charta was not an Act of Parliament but
a constitutional truism: "declaratory of the principle grounds of
the fundamental laws of England."18 Coke thought that the
legislature lacked the legitimate power to alter the British
Constitution, and that the constitution was an accumulation of
legal traditions, developed gradually over time, which rested
ultimately on the wisdom of experience, and upon natural law.19
To him, the power to create fundamental laws belonged only to
God and to the common law tradition.20 He treated sovereignty
as a mystical quality, not capable of full, reasoned explication.
Unlike Blackstone for whom law was the command of the
(earthly) sovereign, to Coke, law was the formal rules under
which people, corporations, and rulers interacted. Americans
drew upon Coke’s constitutionalism.
The definition of a Whig had split in two with each side claiming
to be the rightful heir of the legacy of Protestant, Constitutional
liberty. Both sides assumed that the enjoyment was rights and
liberties was the glory of Britons, and both grounded that idea in
the British Constitution as secured in the Glorious Revolution of
1688. For Parliamentarians a Whig was a patriot who extolled
the revolution of 1688 for bringing the King under law by
placing him effectively under Parliament. To most Americans, a
Whig upheld the right secured in 1688 to live under laws made
by one’s own representatives. Former Governor of
Massachusetts and one of the more liberal imperial reformers,
Thomas Pownall, expressed the perspective of London when he
wrote that "I do suppose that it will not bear a doubt, but that
the supreme legislature of Great Britain is the true and perfect
representative of Great Britain, and all its dependencies."21
Anglo-Americans would not stomach the idea that a Parliament
3,000 miles from their shores, in which none of their own sat
could possibly be their "perfect representative." Massachusetts
Whig James Bowdoin upheld the American position, and
protested taxation without representation as a violation of
America’s English inheritance: "If this could be done . . . [it]
would be Vassalage in the extreme; from which the generous
Nature of Englishmen has been so abhorrent, that they have bled
with Freedom in the Defense of this Part of the Constitution."22
A Briton’s liberty to be taxed only by his representatives was
incompatible his with the liberty to be taxed only by Parliament.
As "Britannus-Americanus" wrote in the Boston Gazette in
1766, "to talk of English subjects who are free, and of other
English subjects, not so free, . . .appears to be absurd."23
Coke’s ideas were therefore a necessary appendage to
Anglo-American patriotism. The full and equal status and liberty
of His Majesty’s subjects outside Great Britain could only be
secured and defended with a constitutional doctrine that dwelled
upon the inherent limits of all earthly power, and thus made the
existence of two legislative bodies in a single nation
constitutionally feasible.24
The rift between Coke’s and Blackstone’s constitutionalism was
the fault line of American independence. In America, unlike in
Great Britain, Blackstonianism was incompatible with English
liberty. By demystifying sovereignty, Blackstone forced to the
surface the tension between Parliament’s role as the legislature
of Great Britain, and as the legislature of the empire, and thereby
made the imperial constitution unworkable. Regarding
Parliament as sovereign, most members of Parliament, and
American Tories like Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts,
did not think British liberties could be separated from
government under Parliament. Hutchinson wrote: "I know of no
Line that can be drawn between the supreme Authority of
Parliament and the total Independence of the Colonies."25 To a
Blackstonian, the Declaratory Act of 1766, which asserted
Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonists in "all cases
whatsoever," was as much of a truism as Magna Charta had
been to Coke.26
Blackstone therefore forced London to think of the American
colonies as "dependencies."27 Dependency implied a
subordination to Parliament and a diminution of rights.28
According to Coke’s constitutionalism, Americans needn’t have
been so treated. The loose imperial system that existed in the
old empire depended implicitly upon Coke’s constitution.
Parliament and the, admittedly subordinate, colonial legislatures
could easily coexist as long as all parties regarded sovereignty
as something beyond reason and understood the inherent limits
on all power. In 1775 former Governor of East Florida, William
Johnstone, tried to make Parliament understand that sovereignty
in practice need not be so clear as Blackstone had made it in
theory:
I say it demonstrates a perfect ignorance of the history of civil
society to assert (which is the captivating argument used in this
House, for the breaking down of all barriers of liberty in
America) that two independent legislatures cannot exist in the
same community, and therefore we are to destroy the whole
fabric of those [American] governments which have sustained
for so many years. . . . I say, a free government necessarily
involves many clashing jurisdictions, if pushed to the extreme.29
Few in Parliament could any longer understand Johnstone’s way
of thinking. When Parliament finally decided to bring some
coherence and consistency to imperial organization and to lay
out what Jack Greene calls the "as yet undefined, even
unacknowledged, imperial constitution," the most up to date
thought indicated that it rightfully had final say on all matters
constitutional.30 Regarding the American colonies, few
Parliamentarians could still grasp the virtues of the old system,
with all its apparent chaos. Constitutional positivism therefore
struck a mortal blow to Anglo-American patriotism by attacking
its root premise of constitutional equality among Britons across
the empire.31
Blackstone therefore made colonists choose between being free
and being British. The necessities of an empire run by
Parliament from the imperial center became incompatible with
the liberties of British subjects living on the imperial periphery.
In his essay, "The Irrelevance of the Declaration," Reid points
out that once one gets past the first two paragraphs, the
Declaration of Independence is nothing more than a common
law indictment of King George.32 In other words, declaring
independence from Great Britain was a final act of devotion to
the Whig constitutional principles that Anglo-Americans had
imbibed since their settlement. Americans assumed a separate
and equal station with their mother country so that they could
enjoy the rights of Britons, and continue the mission of a free,
protestant people in America.
Footnotes
1This language is taken from Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and
Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of
the British Empire and the United States 1607-1788 (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1986).
2 The best summary of Reid’s work is his Constitutional
History of the American Revolution, 4 vols. (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986-1995). Another seminal
piece in this field is Barbara Black’s "The Constitution of the
Empire: The Case for the Colonists," University of
Pennsylvania Law Review 124 (1975-76), pp. 1157-1211. Jack
P. Greene a somewhat dated but still useful overview of the
recent constitutional literature in his essay, "From the
Perspective of the Law: Context and Legitimacy in the Origins
of the American Revolution," South Atlantic Quarterly 85
(1986) pp. 56-77.
3 James Thomson, Alfred, II:v. in The Plays of James
Thomson, Percy G. Adams, ed. (New York: Garland, 1979), p.
227. The next verse of the ode (within the play) reads "The
nations, not so blest as thee,/ Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall:/
While thou shalt flourish great and free,/ The dread and envy of
them all."
4 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 30-33. Colley points
out that Isaac Watts’s best-selling translation of the Psalms of
1719 replaced "Israel" with "Great-Britain." 30.
5 Colley, p.135.
6 Eliphalet Williams, A Sermon, Preached at East-Hartford,
March 6, 1760. Being the Day of Public Thanksgiving, For
the finally favourable Appearances of Almighty GOD, in
prospering his Majesty’s Arms . . . (New London: Timothy
Green, 1760), p. 24. In Portsmouth, Samuel Langdon told his
parish, "we may also be assured by all which God had done in
times past for Protestants, and by the wonderful things which he
has lately been doing for Great-Britain and her allies against a
grand confederacy of antichristian powers." And that, "Divine
Providence has seem’s to point out Britain from the beginning
as a favorite nation." Joy and Gratitude to God for the Long
Life of a Good King, and the Conquest of Quebec. A Sermon
Preached in the First Parish of Portsmouth . . .(Portsmouth:
Daniel Fowle, 1760), p. 17, 23. In general, these sermons rely
heavily on Old Testament texts, with the obvious implicit
comparison of England to Israel. For a specific American
reference to the English (or British) Israel, see Samuel Haven, A
Sermon Occasioned by the Death of King George the Second,
and the Happy Accession of His Majesty King George the
Third . . . (Portsmouth: D. Fowle, 1761), p. 17.
7 A Sermon Delivered at Nassau-Hall, January 14, 1761. On
the Death of His Late Majesty King George II. . . . By Samuel
Davies, A.M., Late president of the College of New Jersey. (2nd
ed.) (New York: J. Parker, 1761), p. 10.
8 John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, iv
vols. L.H. Butterfield, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1961),
I:298.
9 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England:
A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 49.
10 Blackstone, p. 38.
11 Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: University Press,
1961), p. 86.
12 As Charles Andrews wrote, "England began her career as the
greatest and most prosperous colonizing power that the world
has ever known without any fixed policy, in fact, without any
idea of what she and her people were doing." Charles M.
Andrews, The Colonial Background of the American
Revolution: Four Essays in American Colonial History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), p. 5. The imperial
government made periodic sallies into colonial reform and
organization, but concerns closer to home always kept such
efforts from getting very far.
13 Francis Bernard Select Letters on the Trade and
Government of America (London: T. Payne, 1774), p. 67. This
is a set of letters Bernard wrote his superiors on London in
1764.
14 "It was rapidly coming to be understood that the British
constitution was whatever parliament said it was. That maxim
had not yet been generally accepted." John Philip Reid, in Reid,
ed. The Briefs of the American Revolution: Constitutional
Arguments Between Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of
Massachusetts Bay, and James Bowdoin for the Council and
John Adams for the House of Representatives, (New York:
New York University Press, 1981), p. 51.
15 Andrews, p. 154.
16 J.C.D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660-1732:
Political discourse and social dynamics in the Anglo-American
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 61.
17 To King George’s subjects in Great Briton, refusal to pay
taxes was rank ingratitude. Richard Bushman quotes an essayist
in the London Chronicle (1/28/1766) who wrote, "I am equally
grieved and surprised at the waywardness and ingratitude of the
Americans." in Bushman, King and People in Provincial
Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1992), p. 34. Thomas Hutchinson saw colonial living as a
temporary status open to all Englishmen, and argued that
colonists need only return to Great Britain to exercise their right
to vote for those who would tax them., Reid, ed, p. 19.
18 Coke’s Institutes in Thomas C. Grey, "Origins of the
Unwritten Constitution: Fundamental Law and American
Revolutionary Thought," Stanford Law Review 30 (1978), p.
852.
19 For most of his career, Coke emphasized the common law
underlying English government, but in his ruling in Calvin’s
Case, Coke also drew on natural law. American Whigs of the
1760s and 1770s drew heavily on both lines of Coke’s thought.
The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt. in English, In Thirteen
Parts Complete; with References to All the Ancient and
Modern Books of Law, Part 7, Vol iv. (Dublin: J. Moore, 1793),
pp. 1-56. Reid emphasizes the common law arguments that
Americans made. But he points out that "if we look at the
arguments of individual writers rather than official petitions and
resolutions, natural law is the source most clearly identified as
an authority." Constitutional History, I:11. He does not explain
why historians ought to regard such petitions as normative in the
study of what was ultimately a popular uprising.
20 Coke played on the tension between the inherent limits of all
earthly power and the duty of subjects to obey the legitimate
authority. Blackstone undermined that balance. In Calvin’s Case,
Coke wrote, "Concerning ligeance: 1.That ligeance or obedience
of the subject to the Sovereign is due by he law of nature: 2.
That this law of nature is part of the laws of England: 3. That the
law of nature was before any judicial or municipal law in the
world: 4. That the law of nature is immutable, and cannot be
changed." Coke, Reports, part VII, p 8. Coke also wrote in Dr.
Bonham’s Case that, "Herle (d) saith, some statutes are made
against law and right, which those who made them perceiving,
would not put them in execution." Coke, Reports, part VIII, p.
234. The Colonists also drew upon Chief Justice Hobart’s ruling
in the 1614 case, Day v. Savage, "Because even an Act of
Parliament, made against natural equity, as to make a man Judge
in his own case, is void in it self, for Jura nature sunt
immutabilia, and they are leges legum." The Reports of that
Reverend and Learned Judge, The Right Honorable Sr. Henry
Hobart Knight and Baronet, Lord Chief Justice of His
Majesty’s Court of Common Pleas; and Chancellor of both
Their Highnesses Henry and Charles, Princes of Wales, Third
ed., (London: E. and R. Nut, 1724), p 87.
21 Thomas Pownall, Administration of the Colonies, 2nd ed.
(London: J. Dodsley, 1765), p. 89.
22 "The Answer of the Council," in Reid, ed., pp. 36-37.
23 Britannus Americanus, in American Political Writing
During the Founding Era, 2 vols., Hyneman and Lutz, ed.
(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), I:89.
24 David Lovejoy’s The Glorious Revolution in America (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), suggests that political
necessity was part of the reason for the direction of American
constitutional discourse in the eighteenth century. From 1688
onwards, Anglo-Americans sought to secure for themselves the
same rights enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects in London. The
only way to do that was to draw upon Coke’s constitutionalism
which allowed them to hold that the Glorious Revolution was
the triumph of English liberties in all of His Majesty’s
dominions, rather than merely the placing of the King under
Parliament. Clark (passim) indicates that the differing
constitutional doctrines between the imperial periphery and
center grew out of the differing religions of the residents of the
mother country and of the colonies. The overwhelming majority
of Englishmen were Anglican, and that the vast majority of
Americans were dissenters in religion. He makes a strong case,
but this essay shows that the imperial dimension of
constitutional discourse also made a constitutionalism closer to
Coke than Blackstone a necessity for Anglo-America to resolve
its place in British empire with its liberties. Such an explanation
also is more compatible with the strong Anglican leadership of
the revolutionary movement in the colonial South.
25 Hutchinson, Reid, ed, p. 20.
26 The Declaratory Act is 6, George III, cap. 12. It asserted that
the colonists have "passed certain Votes, Resolutions, and
Orders, derogatory to the Legislative Authority of Parliament,
and inconsistent with the Dependency of the said Colonies . . .
[therefore be it declared] That the said Colonies and Plantations
in
America have been, are, and of Right ought to be, subordinate
unto, and dependent upon, the Imperial Crown and Parliament
of Great Britain . . .[who] had, hath, and of Right ought to
have, full Power and Authority to make Laws and Statutes . . .
[for said colonies] in all Cases whatsoever."
27 References to the "dependence" or "subordination"
abounded in the literature that Anglo-American Whigs found
repugnant. Pownall, Bernard and the bulk of the rest of the
imperial reformers who were taken seriously in London
instinctively referred to the colonies as "dependencies" of the
Crown. See Pownall quoted earlier, and Bernard, Select Letters,
p. 67. James Otis was one of the few reformers who tried to
keep the American colonies British and not dependencies, but
few listened to his schemes. See "James Otis: British-American
Statesman," unpublished MA thesis, University of Virginia,
1995.
28 In a notorious set of letters to his superiors in London in
1769, Thomas Hutchinson argued that a diminution of colonial
liberties was necessary to keep the empire together. These letter
came into the hands Massachusetts Whigs. Copy of Letters Sent
to Great-Britain, by His Excellency thomas Hutchinson, the
Hon. Andrew Oliver, and Several Other Persons, Born and
Educated Among Us (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1773). Governor
Bernard made the same point in the letters cited earlier.
29 Reid, ed., p. 11, n 12.
30 Greene, Peripheries and Center, p. 68.
31 In the Liberty case, John Adams complained of "the contrast
that stares us in the Face! The Parliament in one Clause
guarding the People of the Realm, and securing to the Benefit of
Tryal by the Law of the Land, and by the next Clause, depriving
all Americans of that Privilege. That shall we say to this
Distinction? Is there not in this Clause, a Brand of Infamy, of
Degradation and Disgrace, fixed upon every American? Is he
not degraded below the Rank of an Englishman?" Legal Papers
of John Adams, Wroth and Zobel, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap, 1965) II:200. See also, David Lovejoy, "Rights Imply
Equality: The Case Against Admiralty Jurisdiction," William
and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. XVI (1959), pp. 459-484.
32 "The Irrelevance of the Declaration," in Hedrik Hartog, ed.,
Law and the Revolution in the Law: A Collection of Review
Essays on American Legal History (New York: New York
University Press, 1981), pp.46-89.