Placing blame : Criminal law and constitutional narratives in revolutionary Boston
How did the American Revolution shape the emergence of a robust, often sophisticated language of law ? This essay argues that legal language in the formative era of American law can best be understoot by examining public responses to highly publicized criminal trials. Such an approach marks a signif...
Tallennettuna:
| Julkaisussa: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/chs, |
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| Päätekijä: | |
| Aineistotyyppi: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Kieli: | Anglais |
| Julkaistu: |
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés
2009
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| Linkit: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Yhteenveto: | How did the American Revolution shape the emergence of a robust, often sophisticated language of law ? This essay argues that legal language in the formative era of American law can best be understoot by examining public responses to highly publicized criminal trials. Such an approach marks a significant departure from the received historiography. Most traditional historians have portrayed American resistance to British domination as anti-nomian, involving largely riots and extra-legal civil disobedience.This article shows the opposite was the case. Revolutionary Americans were not antinomian, but deeply concerned with legal norms. These legal norms did not await the ratification of the Constitution, but were constructed from the fabric of political, and even ordinary, criminal law cases which became deeply contested causes célèbres. The essay consists of two close readings of inter wining cases that took place in Boston during the 1760s. During the course of these two courtroom trials, a ground-swell of extra-official examinations of these cases-many of them aimed at a popular audience-served to create a criminal law jurisprudence with a revolutionary cast. |
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