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The ancient constitution and the origins of Anglo-American liberty by John Phillip Reid is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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<p>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and American lawyers appealed to "the ancient constitution" as the cornerstone of liberty. According to this idea, constitutional law was not dictated by a monarch but based on the authority of custom, passed down unaltered from time immemorial. Legal historian John Phillip Reid convincingly demonstrates that this concept of an unchanging, ancient constitution furnished English common lawyers and parliamentarians an argument with which to combat royal prerogative power. At the same time, it provided American revolutionaries with legal arguments for rejecting the British parliament's effort to impose arbitrary rule upon the colonies.</p> <p>Whereas modern historians have tended to fault the constitutionalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for inventing a mystical past, these polemical pamphleteers had less interest in the accuracy of their history than in its usefulness in forensic argumentation. Much as lawyers contending before the bar, they appealed to the past as precedent, as analogy, as principle—in short, as forensic history. Claiming that liberty had been more effective and secure during ancient times, the

Who reads The ancient constitution and the origins of Anglo-American liberty?

Author

John Phillip Reid

Publisher

DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press

Published

2005

Language

EN

ISBN

9780875803425

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Law, History