160
Souter, J., dissenting
ence that no common-law doctrine would be received by virtue of ratification was focused in their fear that elements of the common law might thereby have been placed beyond the power of Congress to alter by legislation.
The imperative of legislative control grew directly out of the Framers' revolutionary idea of popular sovereignty. According to one historian, "[s]hared ideas about the sovereignty of the people and the accountability of government to the people resulted at an early date in a new understanding of the role of legislation in the legal system. . . . Whereas a constitution had been seen in the colonial period as a body of vague and unidentifiable precedents and principles of common law origin that imposed ambiguous restrictions on the power of men to make or change law, after independence it came to be seen as a written charter by which the people delegated powers to various institutions of government and imposed limitations on the exercise of those powers. . . . [T]he power to modify or even entirely to repeal the common law . . . now fell explicitly within the jurisdiction of the legislature." W. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law 90 (1975).54
Virtually every state reception provision, be it constitutional or statutory, explicitly provided that the common law was subject to alteration by statute. See Wood 299-300; Jones 99. The New Jersey Constitution of 1776, for instance, provided that "the common law of England, as well as so much of the statute law, as have been heretofore practised in this Colony, shall still remain in force, until they shall
54 Considering the example of Massachusetts, Professor Nelson observes that "the clearest illustration that legislation was coming to rest on the arbitrary power of a majoritarian legislature rather than on its conformity with past law and principle was the ease with which statutes altering common law rights were enacted and repealed in the 1780s in response to changing election results." Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law, at 91-92.
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