Difference between revisions of "American Independence and English Common Law"

|HasArticleText="‘Government is a conditional compact between king and people. ...  A violation of the covenant by either party discharges the other from its obligation.’  ‘An Act [of Parliament] against the Constitution is void.’  In these thirty words Patrick Henry and James Otis denied the divine origin of the British kingship and the legislative supremacy of the British Parliament, and substituted therefor the Common Law and the eternal rights of man."  Thus starts Volume III of Edward Channing’s ‘A History of the United States’.  Spain, England, and France established colonies on the Caribbean Islands and North and Central America for reasons of Empire and commerce.  The colonists themselves had reasons of their own.  Only strong reasons would make them willing to face the long odds encountered in the civilization of a wilderness.  The motives of the governments and corporations that sent the colonists and those of the colonists themselves eventually conflicted.  The words of Americans Henry and Otis in 1760 foreshadowed the reason for the secession of the colonies from England.  The desire of colonists to enjoy the English rights and freedom protected by English Common Law was at the core.  We can, therefore, legitimately trace the American movement for independence to the origins of England’s Common Law.  It transformed England from feudal anarchy to a constitutional society.