| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty. By John Phillip Reid. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. 188 pp. $32.00, ISBN 0-87580-342-3.)

Forensic history is the use of history in legal argument. As such it is a brief to persuade; the lawyer seeks authority, not evidence; his need is to find the law, not the truth. John Phillip Reid's study of the uses of the ancient constitution in British and American constitutional and legal argument is itself a brief for forensic history. This brief rests on the argument that the law of the constitution as articulated by common-law jurists from the sixteenth century onward is inherently a law of liberty, not of will and power. The "authority for the common law, the authority for the constitution, the authority for liberty" (p. 27) found in Gothicism and Saxonism, sustained even during the Norman Conquest (1066), and vindicated in Magna Carta (1215), is the bulwark for both private rights and popular institutions, first against monarchy and then against claims of plenary sovereignty by unreformed parliaments.

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