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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Daniel J. Hulsebosch. Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830. (Studies in Legal History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the American Society for Legal History. 2005. Pp. 494. $45.00.
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| American constitutional historians usually begin with independence, usually limit their attention to North America, and usually focus on court decisions, but Daniel J. Hulsebosch disregards all three conventions. The American Revolution doesn't come until the book's midpoint. The book is thus as much about British constitutionalism at home and in the colonies as it is about the postindependence American version, and as much about the constitutional position of New York within wider imperial structures as it is about the internal constitutional history of New York itself. And while judges play a major role, we also hear the constitutional views of imperial agents, large landholders, frontier settlers, and a host of others. Hulsebosch rolls all of this into a narrative that encompasses standard topics like judicial review of legislation and the status of the common law, as well as a wide range of issues less often encountered in works of constitutional history, like land policy, the role of juries, and the regime of martial law imposed in New York during the revolution. |
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