Overview

From their inception, the colonies exercised a range of approaches to the law. While New England based its legal system around the word of God, Maryland followed the common law tradition, and New York adhered to Dutch law. Over time, though, the British crown standardized legal procedure to more uniformly and efficiently exert control over the Empire. But, while the common law emerged as the dominant system across the colonies, its effects were far from what English rulers had envisioned. E Pluribus Unum highlights the political context in which the common law developed and how it influenced the United States Constitution. In practice, the triumph of the common law over competing approaches gave lawyers more authority than governing officials. By the end of the eighteenth century, many colonial legal professionals began to espouse constitutional ideology that would mature into the doctrine of judicial review. In turn, laypeople came to accept constitutional doctrine by the time of independence in 1776. Nelson shows that the colonies' gradual embrace of the common law was instrumental to the establishment of the United States. Not simply a masterful legal history of colonial America, Nelson's magnum opus fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the sources of both the American Revolution and the Founding.

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Jonathan Yen is a commercial voice-over artist and Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. He was inspired by the Golden Age of Radio, and while the gold was gone by the time he got there, he has carried that inspiration through to commercial work, voice acting, and stage productions. From vintage Howard Fast science fiction to naturalist Paul Rosolie's true adventures in the Amazon, he loves to tell a good story. William E. Nelson is Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law, New York University. In 1961, he founded the Legal History Colloquium at NYU Law School, where nearly 100 younger scholars have held fellowships and received post-graduate training and has presided over the Colloquium since that time. He has been writing and teaching in the field of American legal history for nearly fifty years and is the author of many books, including four volumes of The Common Law in Colonial America, The Roots of American Bureaucracy, Americanization of the Common Law, and The Fourteenth Amendment.

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