Hostname: page-component-5d84bcc8dc-p56h2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-09-05T07:32:11.262Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Imperial Politics, English Law, and the Strategic Foundations of Constitutional Review in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2019

SEAN GAILMARD Open the ORCID record for SEAN GAILMARD [Opens in a new window]
SEAN GAILMARD*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
*
*Sean Gailmard, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, gailmard@berkeley.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the colonial period of American history, the British Crown reviewed, and sometimes nullified, acts of colonial assemblies for “repugnancy to the laws of England.” In this way, Crown review established external, legal constraints on American legislatures. I present a formal model to argue that Crown legislative review counteracted political pressure on imperial governors from colonial assemblies, to approve laws contrary to the empire’s interests. Optimal review in the model combines both legal and substantive considerations. This gives governors the strongest incentive to avoid royal reprisal by vetoing laws the Crown considered undesirable. Thus, review of legislation for consistency with higher law helped the Crown to grapple with agency problems in imperial governance, and ultimately achieve more (but still incomplete) centralized control over policy. I discuss the legacy of imperial legislative review for early American thinking about constitutional review of legislation by courts.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 778 - 795
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

Thanks to Daniel Klerman for inspiring my interest in this topic, and to Deborah Beim, Aditya Dasgupta, John Ferejohn, Lindsey Gailmard, Sandy Gordon, Kinch Hoekstra, Phil Hoffman, Ryan Hübert, Lewis Kornhauser, Dan Lee, Nolan McCarty, Eric Schickler, Ken Shepsle, Mike Ting, and seminar participants at Harvard University, NYU Law School and Yale University for helpful comments.

References

REFERENCES

Banks, Jeffrey S., and Weingast, Barry R.. 1992. “The Political Control of Bureaucracies under Asymmetric Information.” American Journal of Political Science 36 (2): 509–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beim, Deborah, Hirsch, Alexander V., and Kastellec, Jonathan P.. 2014. “Whistleblowing and Compliance in the Judicial Hierarchy.” American Journal of Political Science 58 (4): 904–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bilder, Mary Sarah. 2004. The Transatlantic Constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bilder, Mary Sarah. 2006. “The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review.” The Yale Law Journal 116 (3): 502–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bueno de Mesquita, Ethan, and Stephenson, Matthew C.. 2007. “Regulatory Quality under Imperfect Oversight.” American Political Science Review 101 (3): 605–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Charles, and Kornhauser, Lewis. 2012. “Modeling Collegial Courts (3): Adjudication Equilibria.” Working Paper, SSRN.Google Scholar
Cameron, Charles M., Segal, Jeffrey A., and Songer, Donald. 2000. Strategic Auditing in a Political Hierarchy: An Informational Model of the Supreme Court’s Certiorari Decisions. American Political Science Review 94: 101–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, Daniel. 2016. “Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression.” Perspectives on Politics 14: 700–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ciepley, David. 2017. “Is the US Government a Corporation? The Corporate Origins of Modern Constitutionalism.” American Political Science Review 111 (2): 418–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Tom S., and Carrubba, Clifford J.. 2012. “A Theory of Opinion Writing in a Political Hierarchy.” The Journal of Politics 74 (2): 584–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickerson, Oliver Morton. 1912. American Colonial Government 1696–1765: A Study of the British Board of Trade in its Relation to the American Colonies. Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark Company.Google Scholar
Dragu, Tiberiu, and Board, Oliver. 2015. “On Judicial Review in a Separation of Powers System.” Political Science Research and Methods 3 (3): 473–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farrand, Max E. 1966a. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. Vol. 1. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Farrand, Max E. 1966b. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. Vol. 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Fox, Justin, and Stephenson, Matthew C.. 2011. “Judicial Review as a Response to Political Posturing.” American Political Science Review 105 (2): 397–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, Justin, and Vanberg, Georg. 2014. “Narrow versus Broad Judicial Decisions.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 26 (3): 355–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gailmard, Sean. 2017. “Building a New Imperial State: The Strategic Foundations of Separation of Powers in America.” American Political Science Review 111 (4): 668–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginsburg, Tom. 2008. “The Global Spread of Constitutional Review.” In Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics, eds. Whittington, Keith E., Keleman, R. Keith, and Caldeira, Gregory A.. New York: Oxford University Press, 81–98.Google Scholar
Greene, Evarts Boutell. 1898. The Provincial Governor in the English Colonies of North America. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Jack P. 1963. The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John. 2008. The Federalist. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hulsebosch, Daniel J. 2005. Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1664–830.Google Scholar
Ketcham, Ralph. 2003. The anti-federalist papers and the constitutional convention debates. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Labaree, Leonard Woods. 1930. Royal Government in America: A Study of the British Colonial System before 1783. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lutz, Donald S. 1988. The Origins of American Constitutionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Madison, James. 1884. The James Madison Letters, Volume I: 1769–1793. New York: Townsend MacCoun.Google Scholar
McCusker, John J., and Menard, Russell R.. 1985. The Economy of British America: 1607–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
McGovney, Dudley Odell. 1944. “The British Origin of Judicial Review of Legislation.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 93 (1): 1–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLaughlin, Andrew C. 1932. The Foundations of American Constitutionalism. New York.Google Scholar
Merryman, John Henry. 1996. “The French Deviation.” American Journal of Comparative Law 44 (1): 109–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge Univ Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olson, Alison G. 1992. “Eighteenth-Century Colonial Legislatures and Their Constituents.” The Journal of American History 79 (2): 543–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollard, Albert. 1923. “Council, Star Chamber, and Privy Council under the Tudors III. The Privy Council.” The English Historical Review 38 (149): 42–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rakove, Jack N. 1997. “The Origins of Judicial Review: A Plea for New Contexts.” Stanford Law Review 49 (5), 1031–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogers, James R. 2001. “Information and Judicial Review: A Signaling Game of Legislative-Judicial Interaction.” American Journal of Political Science 45 (1): 84–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, Elmer Beecher. 1915. The Review of American Colonial Legislation by the King in Council. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simpson, Henry Lyman. 1911. A Study of the Royal Disallowance of Colonial Laws, 1680–1765. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Joseph Henry. 1950. Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations. New York: Octagon Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treanor, William Michael. 2005. “Judicial Review before Marbury.” Stanford Law Review 58 (2): 455–562.Google Scholar
Zaret, David. 2000. The Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.