Page 12 - Delaware Lawyer -Spring 2021

FEATURE
Battle R. Robinson
Practicing Law in a New Nation
The law books of James Patriot Wilson
The years following the American Revolution must have been at once exhilarating and unnerving for American lawyers. Cut loose from their mooring with the “mother country,” operating under new and untried national and state constitutions, and dealing with a variety of new laws being spewed out by state legislatures eager for fresh starts, American lawyers and judges faced a time of uncertainty and potential turmoil.1 Indeed, in some quarters there was considerable resistance to continued reliance on the law of another country.
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Yet, when confronted with this un- settled situation, it appears that the country’s lawyers simply contin- ued to rely on familiar English law and practice. As Professor Lawrence Fried- man puts it in his History of American Law, for the new country’s lawyers, “It was impossible to throw over the habits of a lifetime.”2 In this cautious way, the lawyers provided an impor- tant degree of continuity and stability while the new nation established itself. And by the turn of the new century, a
distinctly American jurisprudence was beginning to emerge.
Extant in Georgetown, the county seat of Sussex County, Delaware, is an extensive collection of law books used by the county’s lawyers in the years immediately following the country’s separation from England. The fact that most of these are the work of Brit- ish reporters and scholars and printed in that country illustrates the contin- ued reliance of these American lawyers on British practice and precedent. But