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CRACKING THE CULT OF THE CONSTITUTION
A three-part essay by: Clint Richardson
"Sound confusing? Well it’s supposed to. For you are not supposed to be a party to or have even a basic knowledge of this common law elitist privilege."
OK, I have a problem with that use of the term common law.
Lawyers and Legal Change
Claire Priest
Yale Law School
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2303&context=fss_papers
"Between 1765 and 1840, the number of trained lawyers in Massachusetts rose from fifty to more than six hundred (57). McNamara asserts that lawyers led a successful movement for the building of courthouses that conferred greater legitimacy on the profession and that enabled them to elevate their status above that of untrained laymen, clerks, and scriveners."
"How was architecture-the move from tavern to courthouse-related to the decline of the self-informing jury?"
12 - Law and Commerce, 1580–1815
By Claire Priest
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-law-in-america/law-and-commerce-15801815/20E5CD04E37FD76C3FFE8B5ED0B9607F
"Was empire-building an animating objective of the U.S. government in its early years? Was the Constitution enacted to achieve mercantilist purposes? Were early federal government policies mercantilist? In the early twenty-first century, scholars have been answering these questions with a resounding “yes.” Their answers suggest that American colonialism of the late nineteenth century and the record of U.S. military interventions abroad since then are a continuation of values held since the founding.
"The scholarship contending that the federal government in the Founding Era was by nature mercantilist (or “neo-mercantilist”) and imperial, however, is imprecise and anecdotal. Moreover, it raises complex historical questions that scholars have not addressed. Why would a nation of colonies that fought a revolution against an imperial power immediately adopt the core values of the mercantilist government it had rejected? How “radical” could the Revolution have been if the framers of the U.S. Constitution viewed empire-building as a primary objective? More broadly, if that were indeed the objective, why did the United States avoid the European race for colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for most of the nineteenth century?
"Here, I provide a detailed history of British mercantilism and explain why its core principles were rejected by American political leaders in the Founding Era. Part I follows Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in defining “mercantilism” as the policies in force during British imperial history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to this definition, mercantilism comprises several interrelated positions: first, a commitment to the belief that political power and national strength are achieved by government regulations that improve the home country’s balance of trade;"
Colonial Courts and Secured Credit:
Early American Commercial
Litigation and Shays' Rebellion
Claire Priest
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2298&context=fss_papers
"Yet, while the debt-recording interpretation of colonial courts is the dominant explanation of default judgments in current colonial law scholarship, other evidence characterizes the operations of the colonial court system in a dramatically different way. In 1786 and 1787, shortly after the Revolution, Shays' Rebellion constituted a widespread attack on the structure of the colonial court system, culminating in the violent takeover and closing of many county courts in western Massachusetts and throughout New England. The Shaysites (who referred to themselves as "Regulators") raised an armed revolt against the colonial court system.
They condemned its injurious costliness, its fee structure which, they claimed, enabled judges, witnesses, and sheriffs to profit at the expense of litigants, and its cooptation by lawyers.4"