E Pluribus Unum

In E Pluribus Unum, eminent legal historian William E. Nelson shows that the colonies' gradual embrace of the common law was instrumental to the establishment of the United States. He traces how the diverse legal orders of Britain's thirteen colonies gradually evolved into one system, adding to our understanding of how law impacted governance in the colonial era and beyond.

William E. Nelson is Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law, New York University. In 1961, he founded the Legal History Colloquium at NYU Law School, where nearly 100 younger scholars have held fellowships and received post-graduate training, and has presided over the Colloquium since that time. He has been writing and teaching in the field of American legal history for nearly fifty years and is the author of many books, including four volumes of The Common Law in Colonial America (Oxford), The Roots of American Bureaucracy, Americanization of the Common Law, and The Fourteenth Amendment.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One: The Initial Settlements, 1607-1660
Chapter 1: The Chesapeake
Chapter 2: New England
Chapter 3: New Netherland
Part Two: The Forging of Empire, 1660-1750
Chapter 4: The Crown's Imposition of the Common Law and Colonial Resistance
Chapter 5: The End of Resistance and the Triumph of the Common Law
Chapter 6: Ready Acceptance of the Common Law: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the South
Chapter 7: The Emergence of the Legal Profession
Chapter 8: Property, Commercial Law, Labor Law, and Slavery
Part Three: Altering Empire to Defeat France, 1689-1750
Chapter 9: The Local Structure of Power
Chapter 10: The Law of Religion
Chapter 11: Criminal and Regulatory Law
Part Four: The Collapse of Empire, 1750-1776
Chapter 12: The Well-Functioning Empire of the Mid-Eighteenth Century
Chapter 13: Weakening the Bonds of Empire
Chapter 14: Testing the Bonds of Empire
Chapter 15: Severing the Ties of Empire
Chapter 16: An Historian's Postscript
Bibliography