The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture
and the Empire
Departing from traditional approaches to colonial
legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture
developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic
constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the
Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution―that colonial laws
and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for
local circumstances―shaped the legal development of the colonial world.
Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder
describes how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution
shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the place of
English law in the colonies; the existence of equity courts and legislative
equitable relief; property rights for women and inheritance laws; commercial
law and currency reform; and laws governing religious establishment. Using as a
case study the corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number
of appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she
reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal culture.
