Foreign Law in the English Common Law of the Late Eighteenth Century

This symposium essay contends that the image of the common law drawn by the Supreme Court in the Confrontation Clause context is both distorted and incomplete. In particular, the Court and scholars defending originalist positions rely almost entirely on English sources in their reconstruction of the common law basis for the Confrontation Clause, thereby neglecting the diversity of American common laws from the time of the Founding, a diversity that has already been unearthed by a number of legal historians. By drawing on hitherto untapped sources to furnish a bottom-up reconstruction of how testimony was treated in local criminal courts within mid- to late-eighteenth-century New Jersey, this essay demonstrates that, in at least some jurisdictions, the originalist vision of common law did not apply. The common law cannot, therefore, furnish a univocal answer to questions about the original meaning of the Confrontation Clause.

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COMMON LAW JURISPRUDENCE AND ANCIENT CONSTITUTIONALISM IN THE RADICAL THOUGHT OF JOHN CARTWRIGHT, GRANVILLE SHARP, AND CAPEL LOFFT

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x1400017x ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 58 (1) ◽

pp. 51-73 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

GEORGE BERNARD OWERS

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Natural Law ◽

Common Law ◽

Status Quo ◽

Political Tradition ◽

Political Status ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Ancient Constitution

AbstractA number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition.

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Legal Change, Customary Right, and Social Conflict in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The Origins of the Great Gleaning Case of 1788

Law and History Review ◽

10.2307/743812 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 1-31 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Peter King

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Social Conflict ◽

Common Law ◽

Public Debate ◽

Legal Change ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Legal Precedent ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Law Reports

In 1788 the Court of Common Pleas, after lengthy deliberations, came to a judgment in Steel v. Houghton et Uxor, concluding that “no person has, at common law, a right to glean in the harvest field.” Gleaning was of considerable importance to many laboring families in the eighteenth century; therefore, both the provincial and the London-based newspapers reported the 1788 judgment at length, as well as covering the 1786 case of Worlledge v. Manning on which it was partly based. The 1788 case not only stimulated a widespread public debate over the gleaners' rights, but also established an important legal precedent. From 1788 onward, every major legal handbook from Burn's New Law Dictionary of 1792 to the early twentieth-century editions of Wharton's Law Lexicon used it as the standard caselaw reference. It is quoted in a wide variety of law books written for farmers such as Williams's Farmers' Lawyer and Dixon's Law of the Farm, as well as inspiring long footnotes in the post-1788 editions of Blackstone's Commentaries. By 1904, it was being referred to in the law reports as “the great case of gleaning.”

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Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern Indiacirca1600–1800 CE

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x15000062 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 50 (1) ◽

pp. 175-216 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

INDRANI CHATTERJEE

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Common Law ◽

East India Company ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Historical Processes ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Commercial Networks ◽

Commercial Presence ◽

English East India Company ◽

Made In

AbstractThis article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars.

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