Law and Religion in Colonial America - The Dissenting Colonies

Law - charters, statutes, judicial decisions, and traditions - mattered in colonial America, and laws about religion mattered a lot. The legal history of colonial America reveals that America has been devoted to the free exercise of religion since well before the First Amendment was ratified. Indeed, the two colonies originally most opposed to religious liberty for anyone who did not share their views, Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually became bastions of it. By focusing on law, Scott Douglas Gerber offers new insights about each of the five English American colonies founded for religious reasons - Maryland, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts - and challenges the conventional view that colonial America had a unified religious history.

List of contents

Introduction: English Law about Religious Toleration Prior to the Planting of Colonial America; 1. Law and Catholicism in Colonial Maryland; 2. Law and the Lively Experiment in Colonial Rhode Island; 3. Law and the Holy Experiment in Colonial Pennsylvania; 4. Law and Congregationalism in Colonial Connecticut; 5. Law and a City Upon a Hill in Colonial Massachusetts; Conclusion: Law, Religion, and Historiography in Colonial America.

About the author

Scott Douglas Gerber is Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University, and Associated Scholar at Brown University's Political Theory Project. He is the author of seven previous books and the editor of two others. In 2022, he won the inaugural Christopher Collier Prize from the Connecticut Supreme Court Historical Society.

Product details

• Authors: Gerber Scott Douglas
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 31.12.2025
• EAN: 9781009289047
• ISBN: 978-1-009-28904-7
• Weight: 250 g
• Illustrations: Worked examples or Exercises
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Modern era up to 1918; Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, HISTORY / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775), Colonialism & imperialism, Legal History, 17th century, c 1600 to c 1699, Colonialism and imperialism, History of the Americas, 16th century, c 1500 to c 1599, Religious law and concordats