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Law's Revolution: Benjamin Austin and the Spirit of '86

2013; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Aaron T. Knapp,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

In spring of 1786, a series of newspaper essays appeared in Boston arguing that lawyers and laws on which they relied posed a mortal threat to republican way of life and therefore had to be eradicated forever. Authored by Benjamin Austin, Jr. under pseudonym Honestus, these writings sparked a substantial public dialogue extending far beyond Massachusetts’s borders and, within Bay State, prompted Shaysites to wage what one historian has called the American Revolution’s final battle. The commonly held notion that obstreperous spirit of 1786 reflected a crisis requiring redress, and that ratification of Constitution thereafter resolved it, temps us to consign Critical Period radicals such as Benjamin Austin to losing side of history. The Article pursues a contrary interpretation. It views Austin and his partisans in 1786 as seminal figures in birth of an independent American legal culture. It traces overlooked strains of this post-Revolutionary legal culture from Founding to Civil War and, in process, unsettles foundational assumptions long held dear by American legal historians.