Bøger af John Phillip Reid

This is the first comprehensive study of the constitutionality of the Parliamentary legislation cited by the American Continental Congress as a justification for its rebellion against Great Britain in 1776. The content and purpose of that legislation is well known to historians, but here John Phillip Reid places it in the context of eighteenth-century constitutional doctrine and discusses its legality in terms of the intellectual premises of eighteenth-century Anglo-American legal values. The Authority of Law is the last of a four-volume work, preceded by The Authority to Tax, The Authority of Rights, and The Authority to Legislate. In these previous volumes, Reid argued that there would have been no rebellion had taxation been the only constitutional topic of controversy, that issues of rights actually played a larger role in the drafting of state and federal constitutions than they did in instigating a rebellion, and that the American colonists finally took to the battlefield against the British because of statutes that forced Americans to either concede the authority to legislate or leave the empire. Expanding on the evidence presented in the first three volumes, The Authority of Law determines the constitutional issues dividing American whigs from British imperialists. Reid summarizes these issues as "the supremacy issue", "the Glorious Revolution issue", "the liberty issue", and the "representation issue". He then raises a compelling question: why, with so many outstanding lawyers participating in the debate, did no one devise a constitutionally legal way out of the standoff? Reid makes an original suggestion. No constitutional solution was found because the British were morethreatened by American legal theory than the Americans were by British theory. British lawyers saw the future of liberty in Great Britain endangered by the American version of constitutional law. Considered as a whole, Reid's Constitutional History of the American Revolution contributes to an understanding of the central role of legal and constitutional standards, especially concern for rule by law, in the development of the American nation.

Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there is an official authority to enforce them? Or do we have an unspoken sense of law and ethics? Contested Empire explores the implicit notions of law shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Idaho and surrounding areas in the early nineteenth century.

Roscoe Pound has called Charles Doe (1830-1896) one of the ten greatest jurists in American history, the "one judge upon the bench of a state court who stands out as a builder of the law since the Civil War." This is the first booklength biography of Chief Justice Doe, and as an examination of the constitutional and jurisprudential theories of a state judge it is probably unique.

By the time of the first European contact, the Cherokee Nation had already developed a sophisticated government which embodied a belief in liberty and equality as well as a system of laws regarding murder, property, marriage, warfare, and international relations. This work explores the relationship between the members of the tribe and their law.

This text demonstrates the significance of constitutional disputes in instigating the American Revolution. It addresses the issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights and others.

Provides knowledge about the judicial history of the early republic by recounting the development of courts, laws, and legal theory in New Hampshire. This title chronicles the struggle by which lawyers and torchbearers of strong, centralized government sought to bring standards of competence to New Hampshire.

"Rule of law" - the idea that the law is the nation's sovereign authority - has served as a cornerstone for constitutional theory and the jurisprudence of liberty. John Phillip Reid traces the concept's progress through a series of landmark events in Great Britain and North America.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and American lawyers appealed to the ancient constitution as the cornerstone of liberty. The author demonstrates that this concept of an unchanging, ancient constitution, furnished English common lawyers and parliamentarians an argument with which to combat royal prerogative power.

Focuses on generally unknown events and policies to demonstrate judicial dependence and legislative supremacy over the judiciary. This book disproves the validity of that assumption for state constitutionalism by concentrating on the law of New Hampshire - representative of the law in other jurisdictions - between the years 1789 and 1818.