A Work in Progress: Perspectives on the Evolution of American Legal Culture

In the mid-1820s, Winchester, Virginia, law student Charles James Faulkner penned an essay on the distinctiveness of American law. He reviewed the history of Virginia's settlement and the English law that his forebears brought to the colony. Colonial Virginians considered themselves to be Englishmen, complete with the same rights and laws as those who remained in England. "By a kind of fiction," Faulkner asserted, Virginians "merely extended the bounds of that Empire where this law was to exercise its full influence & operation." It seemed very simple, the way that young Faulkner described it. English migrations extended the bounds of the British Empire, and the colonists carried with them an Anglo-American cultural identity that they associated with their parent country's law. But in reality, the work of establishing their own polities and laws was complicated and laborious. The tasks grew more difficult as the colonies expanded and set out on their own after the Revolution. Historians too numerous to mention have traced the formation of Anglo-American law from the first colonial settlements onward, and in recent years, scholars such as Mary Sarah Bilder, Alexander Haskell, Daniel Hulsebosch, David Konig, and William Offutt have brought this subject into a transatlantic context that blends culture, society, politics and law into more nuanced depictions of early American legal culture. The three works reviewed below contribute to the historiography of Anglo-American law by providing a deeper understanding of the ways that Americans grappled with the complex enterprise of blending English and indigenous law into an Americanized legal culture. Conceptions of Anglo-American identity through the lens of the law inform each of these works.

Beginning with the seventeenth-century origins of Virginia law and moving into the early national period, the authors in Warren M. Billings and Brent Tarter's excellent anthology, "Esteemed Books of Lawe" and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia, follow the arc of Virginia's early legal culture through the study of law books and libraries. This close study of law books and the men who owned and wrote them gives us another perspective on Virginia's evolution from English colony to a mature member of the new United States. In this carefully curated volume, the essays weave a pattern of professional relationships, networks, and change over time to create a coherent whole. The authors bring attention to the oft-neglected importance of legal practitioners and their books in the shaping of identity in early America.

The anthology's first two essays reprise pathbreaking work originally published in the 1970s. Coeditor Warren M. Billings's essay on English legal literature's influence on seventeenth-century Virginia's law and practice, originally published in 1979, and W. Hamilton Bryson's Census of Law Books in Colonial Virginia (1978) opened doors to the history of the law book in colonial Virginia. Billings examines the men who were responsible for adapting English law to the exigencies of the newly established English outpost, their education, and the sources that they used to guide them in this unprecedented undertaking. Bryson's valuable inventory of colonial Virginia libraries, revised for the purpose of this essay, reveals not only the contents of the libraries but also the objectives and priorities of the owners of these collections. Both Billings and Bryson observe that throughout Virginia's formative years, most clerks of court, justices of the peace, sheriffs, burgesses, and councilors did not receive formal education beyond apprenticeship for their trade, but they were not ignorant of the law. Regardless of their level of education, the most useful works consisted of, as Billings puts it, "how-to-do- it" manuals that instructed readers on...