The Sovereign, the Law and the Two British Empires

All political societies have peculiarities, and nothing special is to be concluded from the Anglophone focus of the present article. The theme here is that there was a schism between the fi rst and second British empires, not in itself an original thought, as the paper makes clear. The fi rst empire, as conceived by many historians, was an Atlantic empire governed by the British monarch and the Westminster legislature in the United Kingdom, and by the British monarch through his local representative, the colonial governor and the colonial assemblies. It appeared as a kind of confederation to many contemporaries, including Franklin and Washington, until as late as the mid-1770s. In each of the communities, the common law governed according to the customs of the people, subject to amendment by the appropriate legislature. The latter might be at London, Massachusetts or Philadelphia. For reasons outlined in the article, this system broke down when Westminster asserted ultimate sovereignty and the validity to override colonial assemblies and tax the colonies without their consent. The colonies objected and broke with Britain.In Britain itself and in the remaining colonies, Westminster’sassertion represented a new, stronger view of sovereignty, one in whichlaw no longer even notionally refl ected the slowly changing customs, habitsand expectations of the governed. Instead, sovereignty represented thewill of the sovereign. The legitimacy or validity of laws no longer referredto their content, or their conformity with a “balanced” constitution.Instead, the legitimacy rested in the pedigree of a law. To its practicalquestion, ‘is this a valid law?’ the British imperial world was ready forthe Benthamite answer. The latter was to remain culturally dominantfor many decades, and still dominates the dry fi elds of legal positivismand conservative social science. Bentham asked ‘is a law the sign of thevolition of the sovereign?’ Elsewhere, Bentham asserted that the contentof the law bore no relation to its validity. This article examines thischange from the earlier Whig thought which informed the AmericanRevolution and what became of it.

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