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 their own compelling reasons to face the hardship and long odds that were the daily life of creating civilization in a wilderness.  The motives and interests of the colonists and the governments and corporations that sent them were ever at odds, but as civilization emerged and matured in the New World, those conflicting interests could no longer be ignored.   

|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 their own compelling reasons to face the hardship and long odds that were the daily life of creating civilization in a wilderness.  The motives and interests of the colonists and the governments and corporations that sent them were ever at odds, but as civilization emerged and matured in the New World, those conflicting interests could no longer be ignored.   

The foundation of Common Law was laid by the Plantagenet King Henry II in opposition to localized courts run by the Lord of the Manor and the Church.  Without the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror (Henry II’s great grandfather), in which he defeated (and killed) England’s King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, England would likely have remained in a Continental state of Baronial feudalism for perhaps centuries more,and the colonies in America would have been denied their rallying principle for independence.  

The foundation of Common Law was laid by the Plantagenet King Henry II in opposition to localized courts run by the Lord of the Manor and the Church.  Without the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror (Henry II’s great grandfather), in which he defeated (and killed) England’s King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, England would likely have remained in a Continental state of Baronial feudalism for perhaps centuries more,and the colonies in America would have been denied their rallying principle for independence.