Cite as: 517 U. S. 44 (1996)
Souter, J., dissenting
process which we may call the reception of the English common law by the colonies was not so simple as the legal theory would lead us to assume. While their general legal conceptions were conditioned by, and their terminology derived from, the common law, the early colonists were far from applying it as a technical system, they often ignored it or denied its subsidiary force, and they consciously departed from many of its most essential principles." P. Reinsch, English Common Law in the Early American Colonies 58 (1899).28 For a variety of reasons, including the absence of trained lawyers and judges, the dearth of law books, the religious and ideological commitments of the early settlers, and the novel conditions of the New World, the colonists turned to a variety of other sources in addition to principles of common law.29
It is true that, with the development of colonial society and the increasing sophistication of the colonial bar, English common law gained increasing acceptance in colonial practice. See id., at 7-8; Hall, The Common Law: An Account of its Reception in the United States, 4 Vand. L. Rev. 791,
28 See also Jones, The Common Law in the United States: English Themes and American Variations, in Political Separation and Legal Continuity 95-98 (H. Jones ed. 1976) (Jones) (acknowledging that a true common-law system had not yet developed in the early colonial period); Stoebuck, Reception of English Common Law in the American Colonies, 10 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 393, 406-407 (1968) (same).
29 See, e. g., Reinsch, English Common Law in the Early American Colonies, at 7 (finding that the colonists developed their own "rude, popular, summary" system of justice despite professed adhesion to the common law); C. Hilkey, Legal Development in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1686, p. 69 (1967) (emphasizing Biblical and indigenous sources); Radin, The Rivalry of Common-Law and Civil Law Ideas in the American Colonies, in 2 Law: A Century of Progress 404, 407-411 (1937) (emphasizing natural law and Roman law); Goebel, King's Law and Local Custom in Seventeenth Century New England, 31 Colum. L. Rev. 416 (1931) (finding that the early settlers imported the law and procedure of the borough and manor courts with which they had been familiar in England).
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