The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo–American Liberty Reid Hardback

The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American LibertyAuthor(s): John Phillip Reid\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Northern Illinois University Press\nISBN-13: 9780875803425, 978-0875803425\nSynopsis\nIn the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and American lawyers appealed to \""the ancient constitution\"" as the cornerstone of liberty. According to this idea, constitutional law was not dictated by a monarch but based on the authority of custom, passed down unaltered from time immemorial. Legal historian John Phillip Reid convincingly demonstrates that this concept of an unchanging, ancient constitution furnished English common lawyers and parliamentarians an argument with which to combat royal prerogative power. At the same time, it provided American revolutionaries with legal arguments for rejecting the British parliament's effort to impose arbitrary rule upon the colonies.\n\n Whereas modern historians have tended.