William E. Nelson. E Pluribus Unum: How the Common Law Helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607–1776.

Abstract

William Nelson’s E Pluribus Unum: How the ­­Common Law Helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607–1776 summarizes his massive four-volume work on The Common Law in Colonial America (2008–2017). The argument of the book is set out with admirable clarity in the author’s introduction: In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the legal plurality of the American mainland colonies evolved into a reasonably cohesive common-law domain. Rather than the colonists bringing the common law with them from the motherland as their treasured birthright, it was imposed on them by the Crown in a century-long process beginning with the Restoration. Absent a coercive state apparatus, the reception of the common law in the colonies was possible only by giving Americans considerable discretion about which parts of the common law to accept. Thus, despite growing colonial homogeneity imposed from above, political power remained locally grounded. Nelson argues that an important...