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Contingency and Constitutionalism in Colonial New York

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

David Thomas Konig
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Extract

Of all the comments made by British politicians to describe the United States Constitution, Gladstone's remains the most difficult to deny: by calling it “the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man” he covered the true origins of the document in a mantle of consensus, well understood and coherent in intent, and epitomizing the human capacity for reasoned progress. All of these attributes have little favor among American constitutional historians today, but the remark still makes the rounds.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Summer 1998 , pp. 381 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1998

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References

1. Most recently by Gary L. McDowell, “Reading the Letter of the Law,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4914 (6 June 1997), 7.

2. The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York (Madison, Wise, 1909)Google Scholar.

3. A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.

4. Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691-1776 (Ithaca, 1976)Google Scholar.

5. William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

6. Reid summarizes his contributions in Constitutional History of the American Revolution (abridged ed., Madison, 1995)Google Scholar. See also footnote 16 below.

7. Representative of recent research on the rivalry of these bodies of law is Bellomo, Manlio, The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000-1800, 2d ed., trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Washington, D.C., 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. The term is Max Radin's, quoted by Fallon, Richard H., “‘The Rule of Law’ as a Concept in Constitutional Discourse,” Columbia Law Review 97 (1997): 1–56, quotation at 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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10. Professor Desan has kindly provided me with the monograph on which the present essay is based, and in which she elaborates on this concept of adjudication. [Now see “The Constitutional Commitment to Legislative Adjudication in the Early American Tradition,” Harvard Law Review 111 (1998): (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

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13. Also very useful on this connection are Downie, J. A., “The Commission of Public Accounts and the Formation of the Country Party,” English Historical Review 91 (1976): 33–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Roberts, Clayton, “The Constitutional Significance of the Financial Settlement of 1690,” Historical Journal 20 (1977): 59–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Roberts, “Constitutional Significance,” 64-65. The influence of external fiscal forces on constitutional development is the theme of Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government 1450-1789, ed. Hoffman, Philip T. and Norberg, Kathryn (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar, in which Britain is discussed by David Harris Sacks, “The Paradox of Taxation: Fiscal Crises, Parliament, and Liberty in England, 1450-1640,” at 7-66, and by J. R. Jones, “Fiscal Policies, Liberties, and Representative Government during the Reigns of the Last Stuarts,” at 67-95, with quotation at 84.

15. Records of the Federal Constitution of 1787, ed. Farrand, Max (New Haven, 1937), 2:278Google Scholar.

16. Reid, John Phillip, “The Irrelevance of the Declaration,” in Law in the American Revolution and the American Revolution in the Law, ed. Hartog, Hendrik (New York, 1981), 46–89Google Scholar.

17. “Address on the Disturbances in North America,” in The Speeches of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons, and in Westminster Hall (London, 1816), 1:287.Google Scholar