Common Law and Natural Law in America: From the Puritans to the Legal Realists.By Andrew Forsyth. Pp. 156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. $116.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108476973.

Abstract

For the past hundred years, many Americans have thought of laws primarily as statutes passed by legislatures. As Andrew Forsyth demonstrates in his wonderful book, Common Law and Natural Law in America: From the Puritans to the Legal Realists, this has not always been the case. Formost of this nation’s history, students and practitioners of lawhave been interested in the natural law and the common law, both of which were understood to be grounded in Christianity. Forsyth’s volume provides a sweeping history of common law and natural law in America from the Puritans to the legal realists. He ably shows that until the twentieth century, most attorneys took natural law and the common law seriously, although he recognizes that the ways that each type of law is understood has shifted throughout the nation’s history. By “common law,” Forsythmeans “the system of laws in England and the United States in which laws—whatever their seeming source in a constitution, statutes, orders, or cases—are made explicit through interpretations by judges; judicial decision in individual cases expounded and develop the law... . Far from the creation of judges, in our seventeenththrough early twentieth-century story, America common law was understood as deeper rooted: the custom of the people perhaps, or even nothing less than common reason” (xi–xii). The common law was discovered, not created, by judges, and it was intimately connected to natural law. The latter is “universal morality naturally accessible to all rational people[,]”which “is grounded in—variously—the mind or will of God, nature, or human reason” (xi, Forsyth’s emphasis). In America, this tradition was almost always understood in a Christian context. Forsyth’s opening chapter, on Puritan natural law, is probably the volume’s most important contribution to contemporary academic debates. Far too many scholars continue to accept the caricature of the Puritans as narrow-minded, anti-intellectual religious zealots who rejected the authority of reason and natural law and who viewed all truth as emanating from the Bible. Forsyth acknowledges that the Puritans did not embrace a Scholastic version of natural law, but he argues that they accepted a Protestant version of natural law. The Puritans believed that humans are created in the image of God, and they understood “rationality as the content of the imago Dei” (3–4, Forsyth’s emphasis). They taught about the