11. THE ENGLISH COMMON LAW IN THE EARLY AMERICAN COLONIES 1 By Paul Samuel Reinsch ^ Introdtiction WHEN American legal history comes to be studied more thoroughly, it will perhaps be ^ound that no country presents, in the short space of three centuries, such a variety of interesting phenomena. An old nation, marked for a sturdy sense of right, sends colonies into a wilderness ; they form rude institutions, often suggesting early European experience, to govern their simple social relations. As this society grows more intricate and more highly organized, the legal institutions of the mother country are gradually intro- duced, until a large portion of the common law is trans- ferred to the actual practice of the colonics. Their law, however, always retained the impress of the earlier origi- nality, when new conditions brought forth new institutions and new legal ideas. The struggles with the mother country caused a wide spread of legal knowledge, and the common law came to be revered as a muniment of personal liberties. Blackstone was outdone by American lawyers in extravagant panegyrics. It is only when the rationalizing tendencies of French democracy become triumphant in America, that the
- This essay was first published in 1899, at Madison, in the Bulletin
of the University of Wisconsin, Vol. II. ' Professor of Political Science in the University of Wisconsin since 1901. A. B., LL. D., and Ph. D., University of Wisconsin; Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review ; Delegate of the United States to the Third International Conference of American Republics at Rio de Janeiro, 1906. Other Publications: World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century, 1900; Colonial Government, 1902; Colonial Administration, 1905; American Legislation and Legislative Methods, 1907; International Unions and their Administration, 1907. 367
