The Career of Puritan Jurisprudence

Abstract

Scholars have long asked to what extent there was a distinctive Puritan jurisprudence in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Purita n jurisprudenceis a shorthand that refers to those elements of seventeenth-century Massachusetts's laws and institutions designed or selected because of the early colony's religious commitments. Among the fundamentals of Puritan jurisprudence were the integrated and determined use of legal and ecclesiastical institutions to foster a godly community, the importance of the Bible as a touchstone for the legitimacy of rules, and a constitutional order restricting colony-wide voting and political office to regenerate members of covenanted churches. Some historians speak of “Puritan justice” or “Puritan legal culture” rather than “Puritan jurisprudence.” Differing in detail and emphasis, these formulations point to a core idea animating much writing about early Massachusetts: that the colony lived by a legal order distinctive by the standards of contemporary England and her North American and Caribbean colonies and strongly shaped by Puritan religious commitments and social thought.