Background
Reid, John Phillip was born on May 17, 1930 in Weehawken, New Jersey, United States. Son of Thomas Francis and Teresa Elizabeth (Murphy) Reid.
( Roscoe Pound has called Charles Doe (1830-1896) one of...)
Roscoe Pound has called Charles Doe (1830-1896) one of the ten greatest jurists in American history, the "one judge upon the bench of a state court who stands out as a builder of the law since the Civil War." This is the first booklength biography of Chief Justice Doe, and as an examination of the constitutional and jurisprudential theories of a state judge it is probably unique. Known for his aversion to formal courtroom procedure and for his singular methods of conducting jury trials and appellate sessions, Charles Doe served as Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Judicial Court from 1859 to 1874, and as Chief Justice of New Hampshire from 1876 to 1896. In his thirty-five years on the bench, Doe was responsible for a number of innovations in judicial practice. He devoted himself to reforming the rules of construction, his "newmodelling" of writs revolutionized civil procedure, and his solution to the question of criminal insanity was so advanced that it has not yet been superseded, or even approached, in many states. Perhaps it is in Doe's discussions of torts, where he expounded tenets in opposition to those held by Oliver Wendell Holmes, that one may find the most interesting insight into Doe's view of the law. By redefining and re-emphasizing the distinction between matters of law and questions of fact, Chief Justice Doe demonstrated that an original mind working with familiar legal concepts could depart from traditional doctrine while at the same time maintaining the continuity and essential integrity of Anglo-American common law.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674114000/?tag=2022091-20
( John Phillip Reid is widely known for his groundbreakin...)
John Phillip Reid is widely known for his groundbreaking work in American legal history. A Law of Blood, first published in the early 1970s, led the way in an additional newly emerging academic field: American Indian history. As the field has flourished, this book has remained an authoritative text. Indeed, Gordon Morris Bakken writes in the foreword to this edition that Reid’s original study “shaped scholarship and inquiry for decades.” Forging the research methods that fellow historians would soon adopt, Reid carefully examines the organization and rules of Cherokee clans and towns. Investigating the role of women in Cherokee society, for example, he found that married Cherokee women had more legal authority than their counterparts in Anglo-American society. In particular, Reid explores the Cherokees’ revolutionary attitudes toward government and the unique relationship between the members of the tribe and their law. Before the first European contact, the Cherokee Nation had already developed a functioning government, and by the early nineteenth century, the first Cherokee constitution had been enacted.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875806082/?tag=2022091-20
(The minimum of violence accompanying the success of the A...)
The minimum of violence accompanying the success of the American Revolution resulted in large part, argues this book, from the conditions of law the British allowed in the American colonies. By contrast, Ireland's struggle for independence was prolonged, bloody, and bitter largely because of the repressive conditions of law imposed by Britain.Examining the most rebellious American colony, Massachusetts Bay, Professor Reid finds that law was locally controlled while imperial law was almost nonexistent as an influence on the daily lives of individuals. In Ireland the same English common law, because of imperial control of legal machinery, produced an opposite result. The Irish were forced to resort to secret, underground violence.The author examines various Massachusetts Bay institutions to show the consequences of whig party control, in contrast to the situation in 18th-century Ireland. A general conclusion is that law, the conditions of positive law, and the matter of who controls the law may have more significant effects on the course of events than is generally assumed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0271012404/?tag=2022091-20
(A fresh view of the legal arguments leading to the Americ...)
A fresh view of the legal arguments leading to the American Revolution, this book argues that rebellious acts called 'lawless' mob action by British authorities were sanctioned by 'whig law' in the eyes of the colonists. Professor Reid also holds that leading historians have been misled by taking both sides' forensic statements at face value. The focus is on three events. First was the Malcom affair (1766), when a Boston merchant and his friends faced down a sheriff's party seeking smuggled goods, arguing that the search warrant was invalid. Second was a parade in Boston to celebrate the second anniversary (1768) of the repeal of the Stamp Act--an occasion when some revenue officials were hanged in effigy. Third was the Libery 'riot' (1768), when customs officers boarded John Handcock's ship and were carried off by a crowd including the aforementioned Malcom.Legal inquires into the three events were marked by hyperbole on both sides. Whigs depicted Crown officials as lawless trespassers serving a foreign tyrant. Tories painted the Sons of Liberty as lawless mobs of almost savage ferocity. Both sides, as the author shows, had extralegal motives: whigs to enlist supporters in the other colonies for the cause of independence; tories to bring British troops and warships to Massachusetts in support of the status quo. Both succeeded in their polemical aims, and both have gulled most historians.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0271002026/?tag=2022091-20
( For most of their journey, travelers on the overland tr...)
For most of their journey, travelers on the overland trail to California in the 1840s and 1850s were beyond the reach of the law and its enforcers, the police and the courts. Yet, not only did the law play a large role in life on the trail, it was a law hardly distinguishable from the one the emigrants had left behind. John Phillip Reid demonstrates how seriously overlanders regarded the rights of property and personal ownership when they went west as he explores their diaries, letters, and memoirs, giving an unusually rich and vivid picture of life on the overland trail.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0873281640/?tag=2022091-20
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights, the nature of law, the foundation of constitutional government in custom and contractarian theory, and the search for a constitutional settlement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299108740/?tag=2022091-20
( Constitutional History of the American Revolution Volu...)
Constitutional History of the American Revolution Volume I: The Authority of Rights Volume II: The Authority to Tax Volume III: The Authority to Legislate Volume IV: The Authority of Law John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights, the nature of law, the foundation of constitutional government in custom and contractarian theory, and the search for a constitutional settlement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299108708/?tag=2022091-20
( John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional ...)
John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights, the nature of law, the foundation of constitutional government in custom and contractarian theory, and the search for a constitutional settlement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/029911290X/?tag=2022091-20
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights, the nature of law, the foundation of constitutional government in custom and contractarian theory, and the search for a constitutional settlement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299112942/?tag=2022091-20
( "Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by Engl...)
"Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by English-speaking people in the eighteenth century. It was both an ideal for the guidance of governors and a standard with which to measure the constitutionality of government; both a cause of the American Revolution and a purpose for drafting the United States Constitution; both an inheritance from Great Britain and a reason republican common lawyers continued to study the law of England." As John Philip Reid goes on to make clear, "liberty" did not mean to the eighteenth-century mind what it means today. In the twentieth century, we take for granted certain rights—such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press—with which the state is forbidden to interfere. To the revolutionary generation, liberty was preserved by curbing its excesses. The concept of liberty taught not what the individual was free to do but what the rule of law permitted. Ultimately, liberty was law—the rule of law and the legalism of custom. The British constitution was the charter of liberty because it provided for the rule of law. Drawing on an impressive command of the original materials, Reid traces the eighteenth-century notion of liberty to its source in the English common law. He goes on to show how previously problematic arguments involving the related concepts of licentiousness, slavery, arbitrary power, and property can also be fit into the common-law tradition. Throughout, he focuses on what liberty meant to the people who commented on and attempted to influence public affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. He shows the depth of pride in liberty—English liberty—that pervaded the age, and he also shows the extent—unmatched in any other era or among any other people—to which liberty both guided and motivated political and constitutional action.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226708969/?tag=2022091-20
( "Americans did not rebel from Great Britain because the...)
"Americans did not rebel from Great Britain because they wanted a different government. They rebelled because they believed that Parliament was violating constitutional precepts. Colonial Whigs did not fight for American rights. They fought for English rights."—from the Preface John Phillip Reid goes on to argue that it was generally the application, not the definition, of these rights that was disputed. The sole—and critical—exception concerned the right of representation. American perceptions of the responsibility of representatives to their constituents, the necessity of equal representation, and the constitutional function of consent had diverged gradually, but significantly, from British tradition. Drawing on his mastery of eighteenth-century legal thought, Reid explores the origins and shifting meanings of representation, consent, arbitrary rule, and constitution. He demonstrates that the controversy which led to the American Revolution had more to do with jurisprudential and constitutional principles than with democracy and equality. This book will interest legal historians, Constitutional scholars, and political theorists.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226708985/?tag=2022091-20
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights, the nature of law, the foundation of constitutional government in custom and contractarian theory, and the search for a constitutional settlement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299130746/?tag=2022091-20
( This is the first comprehensive study of the constituti...)
This is the first comprehensive study of the constitutionality of the Parliamentary legislation cited by the American Continental Congress as a justification for its rebellion against Great Britain in 1776. The content and purpose of that legislation is well known to historians, but here Reid places it in the context of eighteenth-century constitutional doctrine and discusses its legality in terms of the intellectual premises of eighteenth-century Anglo-American legal values. The third installment in a planned four-volume work, The Authority to Legislate follows The Authority to Tax and The Authority of Rights. In this volume, Reid shows that the inflexibility of British constitutional principle left no room for settlement or change; Parliament became entrapped by the imperatives of the constitution it was struggling to preserve. He analyzes the legal theories put forward in support of Parliament’s authority to legislate and the specific precedents cited as evidence of that authority. Reid’s examination of both the debate over the authority to legislate and the constitutional theory underlying the debate shows the extent to which the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence were actions taken in defense of the rule of law. Considered as a whole, Reid’s Constitutional History of the American Revolution contributes to an understanding of the central role of legal and constitutional standards, especially concern for rule by law, in the development of the American nation.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299130703/?tag=2022091-20
( This is the first comprehensive study of the constituti...)
This is the first comprehensive study of the constitutionality of the Parliamentary legislation cited by the American Continental Congress as a justification for its rebellion against Great Britain in 1776. The content and purpose of that legislation is well known to historians, but here John Phillip Reid places it in the context of eighteenth-century constitutional doctrine and discusses its legality in terms of the intellectual premises of eighteenth-century Anglo-American legal values. The Authority of Law is the last of a four-volume work, preceded by The Authority to Tax, The Authority of Rights, and The Authority to Legislate. In these previous volumes, Reid argued that there would have been no rebellion had taxation been the only constitutional topic of controversy, that issues of rights actually played a larger role in the drafting of state and federal constitutions than they did in instigating a rebellion, and that the American colonists finally took to the battlefield against the British because of statutes that forced Americans to either concede the authority to legislate or leave the empire. Expanding on the evidence presented in the first three volumes, The Authority of Law determines the constitutional issues dividing American whigs from British imperialists. Reid summarizes these issues as “the supremacy issue,” “the Glorious Revolution issue,” “the liberty issue,” and the “representation issue.” He then raises a compelling question: why, with so many outstanding lawyers participating in the debate, did no one devise a constitutionally legal way out of the standoff? Reid makes an original suggestion. No constitutional solution was found because the British were more threatened by American legal theory than the Americans were by British theory. British lawyers saw the future of liberty in Great Britain endangered by the American version of constitutional law. Considered as a whole, Reid’s Constitutional History of the American Revolution contributes to an understanding of the central role of legal and constitutional standards, especially concern for rule by law, in the development of the American nation.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299139808/?tag=2022091-20
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional issues that divided the American colonists from their English legislators: the authority to tax, the authority to legislate, the security of rights, the nature of law, the foundation of constitutional government in custom and contractarian theory, and the search for a constitutional settlement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299139840/?tag=2022091-20
( Policing the Elephant, the companion volume to Law for ...)
Policing the Elephant, the companion volume to Law for the Elephant, examines criminal activity and its consequences among travelers on the overland trail in the early nineteenth century. Reid consulted hundreds of primary sources to discover how justice was meted out—without police, attorneys, or courts. Separating fact from fiction, he explores how emigrants dealt with spousal abuse, homicide, robbery, organized crime, and larceny. He also looks into famous episodes of executions. Introducing real people and real incidents, his book shows that Americans have been far more law abiding than television, the movies, and pulp fiction would often have us believe.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0873281594/?tag=2022091-20
(Very Good/No Jacket in Boards; 8vo; 248 pages; Ninth Judi...)
Very Good/No Jacket in Boards; 8vo; 248 pages; Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society; 1999; First Edition; Subtitled: Crosscultural Homicide in the North American Fur Trade; Bump to bottom foredge corner of boards; Text clean and unmarked; Appears unread.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/096350861X/?tag=2022091-20
( Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there...)
Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there is an official authority to enforce them? Or do we have an unspoken sense of law and ethics? To answer these questions, John Phillip Reid’s Contested Empire explores the implicit notions of law shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Idaho and surrounding areas in the early nineteenth century. Both the United States and Great Britain had claimed this region, and passions were intense. Focusing mainly on Canadian explorer and trader Peter Skene Ogden, Reid finds that both side largely avoided violence and other difficulties because they held the same definitions of property, contract, conversion, and possession. In 1824, the Hudson’s Bay Company directed Ogden to decimate the furbearing animal population of the Snake River country, thus marking the region a fur desert.” With this mandate, Great Britain hoped to neutralize any interest American furtrappers could have in the area. Such a mandate set British and American fur men on a collision course, but Ogden and his American counterparts implicitly followed a kind of law and procedure and observed a mutual sense of property and rights even as the two sides vied for control of the fur trade. Failing to take legal culture into consideration, some previous accounts have depicted these conflicts as mere episodes of lawless frontier violence. Reid expands our understanding of the West by considering the unspoken sense of law that existed, despite the lack of any formalized authorities, in what had otherwise been considered a lawless” time.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806133740/?tag=2022091-20
( In today's courtroom, the jurors evaluate the evidence ...)
In today's courtroom, the jurors evaluate the evidence and pronounce the verdict while the judge has final authority in interpreting the law—but it was not always so. In colonial America, the jurors enjoyed a much greater say. Legal historian John Phillip Reid recounts how the judges gained their modern authority in the early nineteenth century by instituting courtroom practices modeled on the English "common law" judicial system. Reid brings this transformation, which in the days of the Early Republic spread throughout the states and even to the federal courts, down to human scale by focusing on the legal and judicial career of one man: Jeremiah Smith. First as a U.S. District Attorney, later as the Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Smith promoted a series of reforms between 1797 and 1816. Intent upon placing the law in the hands of professional lawyers, he standardized legal procedures. While Smith made the judge lord of the courtroom at the expense of the jurors, he simultaneously mandated the publication of judicial reports that, by setting a series of precedents, served both to enhance the authority of one reading of the law and to impose limits on subsequent interpretations. As judicial decisions became more uniform, Smith believed, the law itself would become more certain. Not everyone supported these reforms, however. Jeffersonians claimed that such measures threatened to take power from the layman and feared that judges would replace democratically elected legislators as the real lawmakers. Smith himself proved eager to flex judicial muscle and soon found himself wrestling the state's governor, William Plumer. Smith's questionable rulings prolonged a trial involving Plumer's brother; and in 1805, when Plumer failed to honor a summons, Smith ordered his arrest. Plumer eventually exacted his revenge and removed Smith from the chief justice's bench. This conflict between two former friends adds a human dimension to legal history. Thanks largely to the reforms introduced by Jeremiah Smith in New Hampshire, by 1830, legal theory, legal practice, and the law itself were much more uniform throughout the United States than they had been just twenty-five years before. If the reformers had not, as Reid argues, intended to favor any particular class, they did prepare the way for the development of a reliable legal system able to serve merchants and capitalists in the Industrial Age.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875803210/?tag=2022091-20
( "Rule of law"—the idea that the law is the nation's sov...)
"Rule of law"—the idea that the law is the nation's sovereign authority—has served as a cornerstone for constitutional theory and the jurisprudence of liberty. When law reigns over governors and the governed alike, a citizen need not fear capricious monarchs, arbitrary judges, or calculating bureaucrats. When a citizen obeys the law, life, liberty, and property are safe; when a citizen disobeys, the law alone will determine the appropriate punishment. While the rule of law's English roots can be found in the Middle Ages, its governing doctrine rose to power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Phillip Reid traces the concept's progress through a series of landmark events in Great Britain and North America: the trial of Charles I, the creation of the Mayflower Compact, the demand for a codification of the laws in John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony, and an attempt to harness the Puritan Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell to the rule of law by crowning him king. The American Revolution, the culmination of two centuries of political foment, marked the greatest victory for rule of law. Even as Reid tells this triumphal story, he argues that we must not take for granted what the expression "rule of law" meant. Rather, if we are to understand its nuances, we must closely examine the historical context as well as the intentions of those who invoked it as a doctrine. He makes a convincing case; along the way, he employs generous quotations from key documents to fortify his sometimes startling insights. This combination of solid scholarship and intellectual agility is nothing less than what readers have come to expect from this eminent legal historian.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/087580327X/?tag=2022091-20
( In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English an...)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and American lawyers appealed to "the ancient constitution" as the cornerstone of liberty. According to this idea, constitutional law was not dictated by a monarch but based on the authority of custom, passed down unaltered from time immemorial. Legal historian John Phillip Reid convincingly demonstrates that this concept of an unchanging, ancient constitution furnished English common lawyers and parliamentarians an argument with which to combat royal prerogative power. At the same time, it provided American revolutionaries with legal arguments for rejecting the British parliament's effort to impose arbitrary rule upon the colonies. Whereas modern historians have tended to fault the constitutionalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for inventing a mystical past, these polemical pamphleteers had less interest in the accuracy of their history than in its usefulness in forensic argumentation. Much as lawyers contending before the bar, they appealed to the past as precedent, as analogy, as principle--in short, as forensic history. Claiming that liberty had been more effective and secure during ancient times, they upheld an idealized Anglo-Saxon standard for testing contemporary institutions. More significantly, they called upon the authority of the ancient constitution as a defense against the innovations of the English monarchy and against the assertions of an unrepresentative parliament. The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty complements Reid's recent book on another cornerstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence and constitutional theory, Rule of Law. Whereas "rule of law" insists that one law applies to rulers and ruled alike, the ancient constitution embodied the ideal for what that one law should be.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875803423/?tag=2022091-20
Reid, John Phillip was born on May 17, 1930 in Weehawken, New Jersey, United States. Son of Thomas Francis and Teresa Elizabeth (Murphy) Reid.
Bachelor of Specialized Studies, Georgetown University, 1952. Bachelor of Laws, Harvard University, 1955. Master of Arts, University New Hampshire, 1957.
Master of Laws, New York University, 1959. Doctor of Juridical Science, New York University, 1962.
Law clerk, United States District Court N.H., 1956; instructor, New York University, New York City, 1960-1962; assistant professor of law, New York University, New York City, 1962-1964; associate professor, New York University, New York City, 1964-1965; professor School Law, New York University, New York City, since 1966.
( Constitutional History of the American Revolution Volu...)
( Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there...)
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
( John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional ...)
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
(John Phillip Reid addresses the central constitutional is...)
(Very Good/No Jacket in Boards; 8vo; 248 pages; Ninth Judi...)
(A fresh view of the legal arguments leading to the Americ...)
( Roscoe Pound has called Charles Doe (1830-1896) one of...)
( This is the first comprehensive study of the constituti...)
( This is the first comprehensive study of the constituti...)
(The minimum of violence accompanying the success of the A...)
( Policing the Elephant, the companion volume to Law for ...)
( For most of their journey, travelers on the overland tr...)
( In today's courtroom, the jurors evaluate the evidence ...)
( "Rule of law"—the idea that the law is the nation's sov...)
( In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English an...)
( "Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by Engl...)
( John Phillip Reid is widely known for his groundbreakin...)
( "Americans did not rebel from Great Britain because the...)
(Book by Reid, John Phillip)
(First Edition)
Author: Chief Justice: The Judicial World of Charles Doe, 1967, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation, 1970, In a Defiant Stance, 1977, In a Rebellious Spirit, 1979, Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail, 1980, In Defiance of the Law, 1981, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights, 1986, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Tax, 1987, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, 1988, The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution, 1989, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Legislate, 1991, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Law, 1993, Policing the Elephant: Crime, Punishment, and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail, 1997, Patterns of Vengeance: Crosscultural Homicide in the North American Fur Trade, 1999, Contested Empire: Peter Skene Ogden and the Snake River Expeditions, 2002, Controlling the Law: Legal Politics in Early National New Hampshire, 2004, Rule of Law: The Jurisprudence of Liberty in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2004, The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty, 2005.
Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences.