The American Revolution in the Law Anglo-American Jurisprudence Before John Marshall

The American Revolution has been called the seminal event of the late 18th century, and this is no less true in law than in politics. In 1773, John Adams observed that a major difficulty in the debate with England over colonial government lay in the different conceptions each had of the terms "legally" and "constitutionally", different conceptions that were, as Stimson demonstrates, symptomatic of deeper jurisprudential, political, and even epistemological differences between the two governmental outlooks.;This study of the political and legal thought of the American revolution and founding period explores the differences in the perceptions of judicial and jural power that characterized the conditions of law in late 18th century America, as compared to her British counterparts of the period, or indeed of a century earlier.;In Professor Stimson's study colonial juries provide an incisive tool for organizing, interpreting and evaluating various strands of American political theory, and for challenging the common assumption of a basic unity of vision of the roots of Anglo-American jurisprudence.