In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and American lawyers appealed to the ancient constitution as the cornerstone of liberty. The author demonstrates that this concept of an unchanging, ancient constitution, furnished English common lawyers and parliamentarians an argument with which to combat royal prerogative power.

John Phillip Reid is widely known for his groundbreaking work in American legal history. "A Law of Blood," first published in the early 1970s, led the way in an additional newly emerging academic field: American Indian history. As the field has flourished, this book has remained an authoritative text. Indeed, Gordon Morris Bakken writes in the foreword to this edition that Reid's original study "shaped scholarship and inquiry for decades." Forging the research methods that fellow historians would soon adopt, Reid carefully examines the organization and rules of Cherokee clans and towns....

Republishes articles by two senior legal historians. Besides summarizing what has now become classical literature in the field, it offers illuminating insight into what it means to be a professional legal historian.

Focuses on generally unknown events and policies to demonstrate judicial dependence and legislative supremacy over the judiciary. This book disproves the validity of that assumption for state constitutionalism by concentrating on the law of New Hampshire - representative of the law in other jurisdictions - between the years 1789 and 1818.