The Higher Law Background of American Constitutional Law by Edward S. Corwin - 1955

Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Trade Paperback. 1955. Eleventh printing, 1979. Good+. Underlining on several pages. Spine straight, tight, and uncreased. Rubbing to covers. Not from a library. No remainder mark. xiv+89 pages.

This book connects the Western European experience--from the classical world, the Middle Ages, and the seventeenth-century thought of Coke and Locke--to the American founding. This renowned work provides a bold outline of the tradition behind the 'higher law' of the United States and places in historical context the political philosophy underlying the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It addresses questions such as: where did the idea of a 'higher law' originate? how has it been able to survive and in what transformations? what special forms of it are of particular interest for historians and political theorists? and; how was it brought to America and wrought into the American system of government? The men we meet in the pages of this essay--Demosthenes, Sophocles, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Ulpian, Gaius, John of Salisbury, Isidore of Seville, St. Thomas Aquinas, Bracton, Fortescue, Coke, Grotius, Newton, Hooker, Pufendorf, Locke, Blackstone--all insisted that the laws by which men live can and should be the embodiment of essential and unchanging justice, and we may salute them respectfully as founding fathers of our experiment in ordered liberty.