Category
Oral - Textual or Investigative
Description
While much study has been done on colonial legal history, few historians have traced the ideas and legal reasoning that drove the development of eminent domain policies in the British colonies of North America. The legal concept of eminent domain is a way to slice through the generalizations and discover nuances concerning New England and the Chesapeake that perhaps would otherwise remain unknown. A close examination of eminent domain also challenges certain preconceptions about colonial society, attitudes toward authority, and the colonies’ legal connection to Britain throughout the entire colonial era. The legal culture of the colonies, far from being isolated, was deeply connected to English political thought. The American colonies’ approach to eminent domain, as examined in the New England and Chesapeake regions, reveal that contemporary interpretations of natural right and common law predicated the delicate balance between individual property rights and the common good. Additionally, that balance had historically been an object, to one extent or the other, of the English government. American colonies were indeed separated from the mother country by an ocean and existed in an environment and under circumstances unique to them. Yet, they never renounced the principles of English law that had come to distinguish England from the rest of Europe. When the thirteen colonies became “free and independent states,” they preserved, with modifications, a distinctively English political, legal, and social order. To this day, the United States is still very much an English nation. Diversity, republicanism, and over two hundred years of independence have yet to erase that identity. Though a single piece in the puzzle that is the American colonies, eminent domain law enables a small glimpse of the enduring ties between the North Sea island and the American continent.
Your Land Is Our Land: Eminent Domain and the Common Good
Oral - Textual or Investigative
While much study has been done on colonial legal history, few historians have traced the ideas and legal reasoning that drove the development of eminent domain policies in the British colonies of North America. The legal concept of eminent domain is a way to slice through the generalizations and discover nuances concerning New England and the Chesapeake that perhaps would otherwise remain unknown. A close examination of eminent domain also challenges certain preconceptions about colonial society, attitudes toward authority, and the colonies’ legal connection to Britain throughout the entire colonial era. The legal culture of the colonies, far from being isolated, was deeply connected to English political thought. The American colonies’ approach to eminent domain, as examined in the New England and Chesapeake regions, reveal that contemporary interpretations of natural right and common law predicated the delicate balance between individual property rights and the common good. Additionally, that balance had historically been an object, to one extent or the other, of the English government. American colonies were indeed separated from the mother country by an ocean and existed in an environment and under circumstances unique to them. Yet, they never renounced the principles of English law that had come to distinguish England from the rest of Europe. When the thirteen colonies became “free and independent states,” they preserved, with modifications, a distinctively English political, legal, and social order. To this day, the United States is still very much an English nation. Diversity, republicanism, and over two hundred years of independence have yet to erase that identity. Though a single piece in the puzzle that is the American colonies, eminent domain law enables a small glimpse of the enduring ties between the North Sea island and the American continent.
Comments
Graduate