"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for ONE PEOPLE to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…"

"Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of THE PEOPLE to alter or to abolish it…"

In this episode, we explore the creation of the legal concept of THE PEOPLE with the right to overthrow their government.

Topics include :

-the tension in the British Empire between Whigs, who valued popular parliamentary power, and the Tories, who valued centralized royal power

-the organic development of the colonial legal system from a semi-formal, ad-hoc lay profession to a sophisticated, complex formal profession

-the evolution of legal arguments from those that justified dissent and resistance (1764-1774) to those that justified revolution and rebellion (1775-1776)

-legal lessons that American colonists learned from the harshness of British rule over Ireland

-legal lessons that American colonists learned from the corporatist model in Spanish America

-the Whig legal strategy to be broad in its definition of THE PEOPLE in order to include different social classes, different geographical regions, and different understandings of the law (from common, everyday concepts of rights and justice to highly technical concepts derived from constitutional law and legal scholarship)

Richard Ross's books can be found here:

Justice in a New World Legal Pluralism and Empires

Steven Wilf's books can be found here:

Law's Imagined Republic Patent Cultures

The cover image is from John Trumbull's famous depiction of the Committee of Five presenting the Declaration of Independence to Congress. This edited version focuses on the representatives of THE PEOPLE in the background.