Academic

Sellers on Classical Influences on the U.S. Constitution

By Lawrence Solum

Mortimer Newlin Stead Sellers (University of Baltimore - School of Law) has posted Classical Influences on the American Founding Fathers (THE CLASSICAL TRADITION, Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most, Salvatore Settis, (eds.), Harvard, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The American Revolution was a Whig revolution, which made it also a neo-Roman revolution from the start. Americans petitioned, remonstrated, and eventually fought to preserve neo-Roman conceptions of mixed government, liberty, and the rule of law that had dominated British political discourse since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Roman example gave Americans heroes, vocabulary, and a constitution for their revolutionary experiment in government without a king. The most important of the many classical influences on the American founding fathers was the political history of the Roman republic, because the American Revolution was political, and could neither have taken place nor succeeded as it did without classical learning to guide it. With the Revolution?s triumph in the federal constitution, the new American republic supplanted its ancient models. Subsequent revolutions would look to the United States and to its sister republic in France for political inspiration, just as Americans and their predecessors once imitated Rome.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 29, 2009 (boomark / email).