At Liberty Law Blog, George M. Curtis III (Hanover College, History): The Contest for Constitutional Liberty. From the introduction:
In 1993 John Phillip Reid published the fourth and final volume of his Constitutional History of the American Revolution. The subtitles for each volume are noteworthy: The Authority of Rights (1988); The Authority to Tax (1987); The Authority to Legislate (1991); and, finally, The Authority of Law. The shelves of many American libraries, public and private, have welcomed the accumulated weight of historical explanations of the coming of American Independence with political, economic, and social templates serving as the sources of underlying causation. Few, too few, have offered legal and constitutional analyses, an intellectual shortcoming that would have astounded, and likely angered, American whigs watching from their perch in 1775. Of the few who have, fewer have embraced the centerpiece of Reid’s focus on the two constitutions.
This essay seeks to restate Reid’s masterly understanding of American constitutionalism in Authority of Law for two reasons. First, Reid’s interpretation of the immediate causes of the American decision to separate from the home country demonstrates the importance of law in the determination of human affairs. Some may well assert that the embrace of and experience with legal history and principle precede and help to give shape and meaning to political ideas. Insofar as this holds, constitutional idea and principles become vital for an understanding of the narrative of political history.
Second, most American historians, when they do think about the American Revolution not only do not think about it in constitutional terms, but also, if they do, think only of one constitution. Reid changed that when he called for attention to an 18th century British constitution that was in “a state of contrariety–not a state of transition, it is always in such a state, but a state of polarity.” That polarity affected the American colonies as well, and the polarity metastasized after the conclusion of the French and Indian War as Parliament, struggling to pay for the war and organize an expanded American empire, asserted constitutional power in ways destined to clash with the growing American understanding of distinctive colonial constitutional capacities. In brief, the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 signaled the end of more than “salutary neglect.”
Here's a link to Reid's Constitutional History of the American Revolution: Authority of Law (Univ. of Wisconsin Press 1993). And here is the book description:
This is the first comprehensive study of the constitutionality of the Parliamentary legislation cited by the American Continental Congress as a justification for its rebellion against Great Britain in 1776. The content and purpose of that legislation is well known to historians, but here John Phillip Reid places it in the context of eighteenth-century constitutional doctrine and discusses its legality in terms of the intellectual premises of eighteenth-century Anglo-American legal values.
The Authority of Law is the last of a four-volume work, preceded by The Authority to Tax, The Authority of Rights, and The Authority to Legislate. In these previous volumes, Reid argued that there would have been no rebellion had taxation been the only constitutional topic of controversy, that issues of rights actually played a larger role in the drafting of state and federal constitutions than they did in instigating a rebellion, and that the American colonists finally took to the battlefield against the British because of statutes that forced Americans to either concede the authority to legislate or leave the empire.
Expanding on the evidence presented in the first three volumes, The Authority of Law determines the constitutional issues dividing American whigs from British imperialists. Reid summarizes these issues as “the supremacy issue,” “the Glorious Revolution issue,” “the liberty issue,” and the “representation issue.” He then raises a compelling question: why, with so many outstanding lawyers participating in the debate, did no one devise a constitutionally legal way out of the standoff? Reid makes an original suggestion. No constitutional solution was found because the British were more threatened by American legal theory than the Americans were by British theory. British lawyers saw the future of liberty in Great Britain endangered by the American version of constitutional law.
Considered as a whole, Reid’s Constitutional History of the American Revolution contributes to an understanding of the central role of legal and constitutional standards, especially concern for rule by law, in the development of the American nation.
Posted at 6:36 AM