Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition

In this provocative book Justin Buckley Dyer makes a case for the U.S. Constitution's natural law foundations. He does not divine the Constitution's meaning from the intent of the Founders or the understanding of the ratifiers, however. Rather, he argues that natural law informed constitutional thinking and that abolitionists who deployed natural law concepts in their subsequent reading of the Constitution were substantially right. It is an argument dependent largely upon political theory without much attention to history. Dyer first focuses on natural law theory in its classical and modern forms, and the problems that slavery posed for natural law. Before turning to judicial interpretation, Dyer usefully points out the multiplicity of natural law traditions available to judges in the nineteenth century. He begins in England with Lord Mansfield's celebrated opinion in Somerset v. Stewart (1772), which attacked slavery without actually abolishing it. He correctly reads the opinion as a conservative one that embraced natural law principles while limiting its holding and thus its impact. He argues for the influence of this jurisprudence on early republican constitutionalism, especially in the period before the Missouri Compromise awakened sectional tensions. The arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court of John Quincy Adams on behalf of the Amistad captives in 1841 point, says Dyer, to a recognition of constitutional disharmony and the abolitionist demand that natural law principles intervene when the law was unclear

Black letter law · Common law · Comparative law · Constitution · Constitutional law · Constitutionalism · Democracy · Jurisprudence · Natural law · Originalism · Political science · Politics · Positive law · Private law · Sociology · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies · Legal Systems and Judicial Processes

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