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In This Issue

This issue presents five articles that address the limits of law’s authority. The first two articles examine English efforts to control defiant local populations in eighteenth-century Massachusetts and nineteenth-century Ireland. The issue then turns to the role of law in the United States during the antebellum era. Two articles re-examine judicial attempts to define the place of slavery, including the controversial United States Supreme Court decision in Prigg v. Pennsylania (1842) and the later role of antislavery judges in upholding the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The final article reveals the defining role of slavery in the emerging political culture of the trans-Mississippi Southwest. Collectively, these articles show the inherent friction between formal law and local culture in empire building and expansion. Our first article, by Neil York, examines why the English did not prosecute American colonists for treason in the years leading up to the Revolution. As his article points out, from 1768 to 1775 there were those in Britain who believed that either treason ought to be broadly construed, to make prosecutions possible, or that an old parliamentary statute should be revived so that the trials could take place in English rather than in colonial courts to assure convictions. Yet no trials followed, even as rebels in Massachusetts took over the colony without firing a shot. It is ironic, as York observes, that these revolutionaries were able to turn the tables on imperial authorities by alleging that the defenders of empire were the real traitors, whereas they, the revolutionaries, stood as defenders of the law. They could do so, he explains, partly because treason was poorly defined and partly because the constitutional relationship between mother country and colonies had never been defined. Most importantly, he concludes, imperial administrators could find no effective way to apply the law of treason without causing the very confrontation that they hoped to avoid.