The Transatlantic Constitution

Reviews / Votes

This study of the British imperial constitution, based upon extensive research in English and American archives, is one of the more significant recent pieces of scholarship in this area... Mary Sarah Bilder has come to some new conclusions that make this short volume essential reading for all students of early America. -- Herbert A. Johnson * Journal of American History * Bilder is one of those energetically prudent scholars who appear in full control of their considerable enthusiasms. She never exaggerates her cases. She welcomes other investigations, but she rightly understands that the micro-level of investigation that we find here represents the work that is now needed in legal history, and she does not shy away from the extensions that are possible from it. There is, in fact, considerable grace in Bilder's ability to supply the details without losing her reader in them. -- Robert A. Ferguson * Law and History Review * In The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire, Mary Sarah Bilder finds evidence for a transatlantic constitutional culture that influenced everything from the intellectual formation of colonial lawyers and judges, to the course of appeals of inheritance cases, to the beginnings of judicial review in the early Republic... The argument is lucidly presented and clearly compelling... The clarity of Bilder's argument will make the book, and the tradition of legal constitutional history of empire from which it emanates, compelling to scholars outside the field of American legal history. -- Lauren Benton * Law & Social Inquiry * Mary Sarah Bilder's The Transatlantic Constitution is an excellent example of the wealth of fresh insights that a focus on constitutionalism still has to offer... Bilder's argument is so compelling, and her delineation of transatlantic legal culture so revealing, that historians will undoubtedly feel the need to test her results elsewhere. Atlantic history will be all the richer for it. -- Alexander B. Haskell * William and Mary Quarterly * Bilder describes an emerging Colonial legal profession and clearly explains the function of the local and imperial legal systems. Largely a legal history of case law that determined if Colonial divergence was indeed not repugnant, the book is rich in social history as well, with the evolving status of women and institutional religion providing much of the legal grist. -- E. R. Crowther * Choice * The Transatlantic Constitution makes a major impact on the way we see the legacy of the colonial period and the later federal relationship that continues to affect us today. Mary Sarah Bilder presents an intensive examination of the structure and functioning of the legal relationship across the Atlantic, between the people of a colony and the legal metropolis in London. This exhaustively researched and deeply informed book recasts the way we think about how the 'transatlantic relationship' affected law and authority. -- David Konig, Washington University in St. Louis Mary Sarah Bilder has taken an old and long-unfashionable topic and successfully given it new interest, perspective, and importance. She is the first historian to explore the relationship between colonial legal culture and sources of constitutional authority within the British empire, and she does so with a fine appreciation for the negotiated, pragmatic, and changing nature of the relationship. This book is a major contribution to colonial American legal, constitutional, and imperial history and sets the standard for future study of the transatlantic constitution. -- Bruce H. Mann, author of <i>Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence</i>