Law Professor's New Book Covers Origins of American Law
September 18, 2014
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
University of Baltimore School of Law Professor John Bessler's new book, The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution, tells the little-known story of the origins of U.S. law—how an 18th-century philosophical work by a 26-year-old Italian thinker, Cesare Beccaria, became a pre-Revolutionary War bestseller in the American states and profoundly influenced the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and early American laws.
Beccaria's work, On Crimes and Punishments, argued against the death penalty and torture, and inspired America's founders to reject England's Bloody Code—which relied on executions and corporal punishment—and to adopt the penitentiary system instead.
The cast of characters in Professor Bessler's book includes George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison, as well as Italian botanist Count Luigi Castiglioni, who visited the 13 original American states before the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
In The Birth of American Law, Bessler shows how Beccaria's "game-changing" treatise informed the creation of the United States and its nascent legal system.
Bessler is also the author of Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders' Eighth Amendment, Kiss of Death: America's Love Affair with the Death Penalty and Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America, among other books.
The Birth of American Law is available in hardcover from Carolina Academic Press. Find it here.
Learn more about John Bessler.