After the Revolution: “Reform” of the Law of Inheritance

Abstract

The American victory in the Revolutionary War was followed by a spate of lawmaking, the silence that succeeded the clash of arms being promptly shattered by a legislative hubbub. One North Carolina judge in 1787 likened the colonists' legal situation after the Revolution to that of “a set of people shipwrecked and cast on a marooned island.” Like so many Robinson Crusoes, they were “without laws, without magistrates, without government, or any legal authority.” A new political order was urgently required, so constitutions were drafted and adopted in short order. Civil laws were needed as well, and rules of decision for the new state courts. By and large, English common law was maintained, a familiar system with which most people were satisfied and one, moreover, that had gained added luster from revolutionary arguments based on defense of the rights of “freeborn Englishmen.”