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COMMON LAW JURISPRUDENCE AND ANCIENT CONSTITUTIONALISM IN THE RADICAL THOUGHT OF JOHN CARTWRIGHT, GRANVILLE SHARP, AND CAPEL LOFFT

2015; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0018246x1400017x

1469-5103

GEORGE BERNARD OWERS,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

Abstract A number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition.