文档介绍：University of California at Berkeley
School of Law
The Mixed Constitution and the
Common Law
by David Lieberman
UC Berkeley School of Law
Public Law and Legal Theory
Working Paper No. 99-4
September 1999
A revised version of this working paper is ing in
Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century
Political Thought, (Cambridge University Press)
UC Berkeley Public Law and
Legal Theory Working Paper Series
UC Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-7200
This paper can be downloaded without charge from the
Social Science work Paper Collection at
http://papers./?abstract_id=184708
The Mixed Constitution and mon Law
David Lieberman
[ing in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought,
eds. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge University Press)]
Accounts of England’s constitutional system1, even in the more systematic
treatments of the middle decades of the eighteenth century, followed mon early-
modern pattern in which political theory prised an uneven amalgam of classical
maxims of government, narrow partisan polemics, antiquarian learning, historical researches
and technical legal doctrine. None the less, ‘the constitution of England’, so constructed,
enjoyed an extensive influence on liberal political philosophy and western statecraft well
beyond its place of origins and the particular circumstances of its first articulation. ‘The eye
of curiosity seems now to be universally turned’ to this ‘model of perfection’, explained Jean
Louis Delolme in the 1770s (Delolme 1834, ). And what was to be discovered in this
model were the general principles of political freedom. ‘‘Tis the Britannic Constitution that
gives this kingdom a lustre above other nations’, extolled Roger Acherley a half-century
earlier, ‘as it secures to Britons, their private property, freedom and liberty, by such walls of
defense as are not to be found in any othe