Law in the Colonial South

Instead, gentlemen-scholars operated independently of one another, and the aggregate of their efforts was a hodgepodge of statutory editions, judicial biographies, and explorations of doctrine, jurisprudence, and the rise of courts.3 Descent into civil war in 1861 abruptly halted their dipping into legal history and visited colossal destruction on southern colonial archives. Settlers in both French and Spanish places tackled the same issues of governance, legal authority, and discontinuities that vexed English colonists, but the solutions of the French and Spanish rested upon the civil law, a codified descendant of ancient Roman precepts, which distinguished their legal architectures from those of the British.