British Statutes in American Law, 1776-1836

When a dependency severs its formal connection with the mother country - irrespective of the century in which such severance occurs - the act of independence can neither eradicate the past nor solve all problems of the future. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the United States of America discovered that independence from Great Britain in itself did not abolish the need for rules and regulations by which men could anticipate with some degree of certainty the consequences of particular actions. Wholesale adoption of such English statutes as were suited to their condition offered a solution to the need for a body of laws. At the same time it avoided the need to draft and enact a comprehensive body of legislation at the moment the newly independent jurisdictional entities were faced with a wide assortment of internal and external problems. As colonists, the citizens of these newly independent states had clamored for the untrammelled use of the English statutes and the common law and had made much of Great Britain\u27s refusal to concede such use. After 1776 they were free to use, adapt, or reject the statutes and the common law which they had claimed as their birthright and heritage. This study is designed to show the extent to which British statutes without re-enactment were declared to be or were considered to be in force or not in force in the twenty-eight separate jurisdictions of the United States during the first sixty years of the nation\u27s independence. To keep the scope of the study within reasonable limits, no substantial effort was made to learn the extent to which English statutes were re-enacted as state or territorial statutes. That this re-enactment did occur in some jurisdictions is apparent upon an examination of the early state or territorial statutes, especially those dealing with subjects such as wills or uses or waste. That such re-enactment, together with the enactment of state or territorial acts geared to local needs, lessened the use of and emphasis upon English statutes is likewise apparent. It is not irrelevant to note that codification of a jurisdiction\u27s laws was more frequently than not coupled with a repeal of all English statutes heretofore in force.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1026/thumbnail.jp