Common Law and Natural Law in America
From the Puritans to the Legal Realists

Presents an ambitious narrative and fresh re-assessment of common law and natural law's varied interactions in America, 1630 to 1930.

Andrew Forsyth (Author)

9781108701815, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 May 2022

172 pages
23 x 15.2 x 1 cm, 0.27 kg

'… provides an excellent overview of how natural law and common law have been intertwined throughout American history.' Mark David Hall, Journal of Law and Religion

Speaking to today's flourishing conversations on both law, morality, and religion, and the religious foundations of law, politics, and society, Common Law and Natural Law in America is an ambitious four-hundred-year narrative and fresh re-assessment of the varied American interactions of 'common law', the stuff of courtrooms, and 'natural law', a law built on human reason, nature, and the mind or will of God. It offers a counter-narrative to the dominant story of common law and natural law by drawing widely from theological and philosophical accounts of natural law, as well as primary and secondary work in legal and intellectual history. With consequences for today's natural-law proponents and critics alike, it explores the thought of the Puritans, Revolutionary Americans, and seminal legal figures including William Blackstone, Joseph Story, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the legal realists.

1. Puritan natural law: early New England and the colonial colleges
2. Modern natural law: revolutionaries and republicans
3. Organizing common law: William Blackstone in America
4. subsuming natural law into common law: Joseph Story
5. Law as science: Christopher Columbus Langdell
6. Breaking with natural law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the legal realists
Epilogue
Index.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], Energy & natural resources law [LNCR], Legal history [LAZ], Law & society [LAQ], Common law [LAFC], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Constitution: government & the state [JPHC], Political ideologies [JPF], Religion: general [HRA]