Papers by Shannon Stimson
Princeton University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 1990
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1990
The aim of this essay is to challenge the assumption of a basic unity of vision and purpose at th... more The aim of this essay is to challenge the assumption of a basic unity of vision and purpose at the roots of Anglo-American jurisprudence through a study of the role of juries and judgment in revolutions. Through a comparative look at the relationship between English and American conceptions of law and judgment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the conclusion can be reached that British and American jurisprudence are separated not only historically by differing court practices which commentators have frequently observed, but correlatively by essentially different theoretical conceptions of sovereignty, the nature of law, and the extent of ordinary citizens’ power to judge the legitimacy of law. This last factor has been far less frequently observed, if not implicitly denied, by legal commentators. From a theoretical perspective, this comparative analysis helps to explain why the question of the scope and limits of the judicial function in a democratic state is the overarching question of American jurisprudence, whereas in English jurisprudence it remains a question of little significance.1 At the same time, this study aims to contribute to the contemporary debate among legal and philosophical analysts of the American judicial system, by adding to these typically limited and abstract discussions of competing theories of law and adjudication a theoretical and historically informed discussion of the evolution of judicial institutions whose nature these theories are intended to elucidate.2 The aim is to reconstruct an intellectual and historical problematic that provoked both significant constitutional debate and innovative legal and jurisprudential responses in eighteenth-century American jurisprudence. That problematic is one of determining the proper locus of judgment about the content and ‘constitutionality’ of law.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2002
In the task of searching for ways to ‘interpret’ the American Constitution and to understand (so ... more In the task of searching for ways to ‘interpret’ the American Constitution and to understand (so as to delimit) the function of the Supreme Court, constitutional and jurisprudential theorists have almost invariably begun with Marshall’s principal opinions. He remains ‘The Source’, even as widespread uncertainty and disagreement persist about the actual character of his contribution to understanding the court’s function or indeed about any particular opinion he may have written. Nevertheless, from the perspective of jurisprudential innovation, the differing perspectives on the role of courts and juries in maintaining a space for reflective judgment within the sphere of popular politics that we have already examined preceded Marshall’s major opinions (such as Marbury). Indeed, importantly, there is every reason to believe that Marshall’s jurisprudence drew from, rather than added to, at least two of these perspectives, those of Hamilton and Wilson.
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Sep 15, 2014
Adam Smith was born and baptized on June 5, 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, the son of Adam Smith, S... more Adam Smith was born and baptized on June 5, 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, the son of Adam Smith, Sr. and his wife, Margaret Douglas. He died on July 17, 1790, at Panmure House in Edinburgh and was buried there in Canongate churchyard. An individual who chose to live a private and socially retiring life – more than half of it with his mother and a cousin in the city of his birth – Smith sought with considerable success to protect his lasting reputation by having many of his private and unpublished papers and lectures burned “without any examination” at the time of death. Fortunately for posterity, some of Smith's essays on philosophical subjects escaped this conflagration and were published posthumously by his literary executors. A further two sets of notes on his lectures on jurisprudence and one set from his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres later emerged in the form of student accounts and have been restored to scholars. Keywords: civil society; classical political economy; division of labor; Enlightenment; invisible hand; markets
Princeton University Press eBooks, Oct 7, 2016
Princeton University Press eBooks, Oct 7, 2016
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1990
The colonial judiciary and particularly the jury system have been neglected subjects of early Ame... more The colonial judiciary and particularly the jury system have been neglected subjects of early American law. Yet, it is common knowledge that the American colonies won their independence at a time when the jury system was being acclaimed as a fundamental guarantor of individual liberty. When colonial intractability was first displayed over the Sugar Act of 1764, the issue was not simply one of taxation, but, as Burke recognized, principally one of the power of Parliament to set aside trial by jury in an effort to enforce vastly unpopular legislation. By this act … so construed and so applied, almost all that is substantial and beneficial in a trial by jury is taken away from the subject in the colonies. A person is brought hither in the dungeon of a ship’s hold; thence he is vomited into a dungeon on land, loaded with irons, unfurnished with money, unsupported by friends, three thousand miles from all means of calling upon or confronting evidence, where no one local circumstance that tends to detect perjury can possibly be judged of; — such a person may be executed according to form, but he can never be tried according to justice.1 The British insistence on trying offenders in hated Admiralty courts was precisely a heavy-handed attempt to preclude the registering of popular sentiment with regard to these laws through jury trials. Colonials held tightly to the institution of trials by jury and lashed out at any attempt to curtail or circumvent it.2
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1990
From Alexander Hamilton’s perspective, no mechanical structure ‘checking and balancing’ orders of... more From Alexander Hamilton’s perspective, no mechanical structure ‘checking and balancing’ orders of men, such as Adams proposed, could alone save a ‘factious’ people from destroying itself. Nor could men rely, as Jefferson seemed to suggest, on the improvement of human nature through technological progress and education. Although their individual visions differed, both Adams and Jefferson held out hope that a new ‘science’ of politics (or man) would vest final judgment about public law with a community or an order of homogeneous and likeminded men.1
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1990
It has been said that in the absence of legal training, past historians have failed sufficiently ... more It has been said that in the absence of legal training, past historians have failed sufficiently to appreciate the relevance of law as a conceptual template, shaping the character of the American revolutionary project. One legal historian, John Reid, has even suggested that non-legal historians have indeed ‘misunderstood the legal and constitutional history of the American Revolution’.1 In particular, Reid pinpoints a failure to appreciate the function of law both ‘in setting the stage’ for rebellion and in ‘formulating the conditions’ under which it was to be fought.2 By such ‘conditions of law’ Reid understands ‘not merely substantive rules of law, but the certainty, the power, and the effectiveness of that law and whether it was directed by a unicentric or multicentric authority’.3 Indeed, Reid argues persuasively that ‘legal stagesetting’ as well as constitutional concerns played a pervasive but distinguishable role in pre-revolutionary American politics. It would therefore seem particularly fruitful to consider how such conditions or legal stagesetting may have featured as well in the developing post-revolutionary American understanding of court function — particularly in decisions with regard not only to interpreting but to striking down procedurally legitimate laws.
William and Mary Quarterly, Apr 1, 1995
The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Jul 18, 2014
The locution, “classical political economy,” was coined by Karl Marx, writing in the first editio... more The locution, “classical political economy,” was coined by Karl Marx, writing in the first edition of Capital, volume 1, in order to describe those “economists who, since the time of W[illiam] Petty, have investigated the real internal framework [Zusammenhang] of bourgeois relations of production, as opposed to the vulgar economists who only flounder around with the apparent framework of those relations” (Marx 1977 [1867]: 174–5). Marx's own association with classical political economy was both liminal and critical, characterizing it as belonging to that period in England in which, he argued, “the class struggle was as yet undeveloped” (Marx 1977 [1867]: 96). For Marx, that described a period roughly from the time of Petty's Political Arithmetick (1899 [1690]), through Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]), to The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (2005 [1821/1817]) of David Ricardo. The key element common among the “classicals” as Marx characterized them, was recognition of some form of the labor theory of value and the proposition that the key theoretical relations of production to be studied were those between the elements of rent and wages in the early manufactory production, and socially, those relations among the larger aggregate groupings of society sustained by either rent, wages, or capital (profits), rather than the relations of putative individual actors in the market. Of Ricardo, Marx wrote in Capital, that while his analysis of the magnitude (i.e., measure) of value was “insufficient,” Ricardo had “ultimately (and consciously) made the antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting point of his investigations” (Marx 1977 [1867]: 96). Keywords: equality; justice; laissez-faire; liberalism; liberty; property
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Papers by Shannon Stimson