The settlers, who colonized British North America during the 1600s and 1700s, displacing Native Americans through war and disease, came from many nations. Most of the settlers shared an English heritage; so English cultural institutions predominated (Leyh Publishing, 2002).

The greatest influence on American law was the “common law” of England. Despite the existence of the royal courts known as the Kings bench these other courts and legal systems , English people in both England and America believed that they had a right to traditional common-law procedures and rules, such as the right to a trial before a neutral judge and jury; the guarantee that one’s life, liberty, and property could only be taken through proper legal process: the right to know the charges levied against one; the rule that one was innocent until proven guilty and the right to be represented by counsel and to present witnesses. They believed that these rights were

There were some rights that people could not give up. No one had the right to take his or her own life, even in a state of nature, and therefore no one could surrender his right to life to the supreme Legislative. Nor, in a state of nature, did one have the right arbitrarily to take the life, liberty, or property of another. One could only protect them from the wrongful acts of others; Government’s powers were therefore limited to promoting prosperity and to protecting life, liberty, and property. It could punish crime, but it could not deprive innocent people of that trinity without their consent. In England, this consent was given by the people’s representatives in Parliament. Thus, “civil liberty” meant the right to live under laws designed to protect one’s life liberty, and property from being infringed upon arbitrarily by others (Leyh Publishing, 2002).

Individual freedom can survive only under a system of law by which both the sovereign and the governed are bound. Such a system of fundamental laws, whether written or embodied in tradition, is known as a constitution. The idea of government limited by law received effective expression for the first time in the Magna Carta (1215), which checked the power of the English king. The Magna Carta did not stem from democratic or egalitarian beliefs; rather, it was a treaty between king and nobility that defined their relationship and laid the basis for the concept that the ruler was subject to the law rather than above it. The development of constitutional government was slowed by the persistence of the ideas of absolutism, the belief that all political power should be in the hands of one individual, and divine right, which held that kings derived their power from—and were only accountable to—God. The reigns of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs in England were marked by fierce conflicts between the Crown and Parliament (Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002).

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