Historical Law Quotes
The code provided for trial by jury and for proportional taxation on property. It was called “The Duke’s Laws” in recognition of the English Duke of York from whom authority in the colony then derived as the English supplanted the Dutch.
47 laws were promulgated. Most had a maritime justice tradition. They are often referred to as the "Laws of Oleron."
There was, well before the American Revolution, a restriction on the importation of British goods into the American colonies. Partially this was to pressure Parliament to stop some of its most repressive lawmaking. But it also supported what had become a very lucrative protectionist monopoly of large American merchants. See {636861}.
Slaves could not own property in most of Southern America. The Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Germans, the Poles, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French had provided, both by law and by custom, for the possession of property by the slave, which could, not be seized by his master. This is another sense in which American slavery was even worse than most slavery had been.
Some of the “originalist” judges like Antonin Scalia believe that the “straightjacket” was what was intended by the originators of the Constitution and this was a good thing.
This early Pennsylvania law is surprising to many readers. Homosexuality under Mosaic law which most colonies followed was a capital crime. In the case of a Massachusetts rape law 3-years earlier, the judge was given discretion in imposing the death penalty for a traditional Biblical Capital Crime. However, in this Pennsylvania law, there was no provision for capital punishment for homosexual acts. Whipping was as far as they went.
This gun control was not even the first in the nation. See {613055}. However it even applied to free Negroes, halfbreeds, as well as slaves. Five years later even though Virginia needed militia for the French and Indian Wars they passed a law barring even Free Blacks from serving in the Militia except “as drummers or trumpeters.” This the whites felt was critical in that most whites did not own firearms. See {613056}.
